Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction

Abstract

‘Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic?’ This statement, which had been ascribed to Aristotle for a long time, can be regarded as the foundation of the long-standing cultural history of melancholia.1 It shows that the phenomenon was regarded as more than an illness already in ancient times. In 350 BC, melancholia is understood as an epiphenomenon of, or even as a prerequisite for, outstanding cultural and political achievements and deep philosophical insight, although Pseudo-Aristotle at the same time acknowledges the pain caused by melancholia. In its interrelated medical and cultural histories, melancholia has maintained such a complex denotation: it has frequently been understood as a painful condition which opens up an avenue to deeper insight, to judiciousness and to creativity. Such a ‘nobilitation’ constitutes the main difference between melancholia and today’s category of depression. Despite the fact that traces of melancholia’s history can be found in the current psychiatric definition of depression, the cultural status of the phenomena differ decisively.2 The ‘nobilitation’ of melancholia and its association with philosophy, science and art is emblematically captured in Albrecht Durer’s engraving Melencolia I, an image with an immense iconographic influence on later visual representations of melancholia (Fig. 1.1), including Alberto Giacometti’s cube that is reproduced on the cover of this book. Here, as elsewhere in the visual arts, the representation of the melancholic makes a psychological state of mind correspond with the outside world; the personification of melancholia is situated in allegorical or symbolic spaces.