The Difference Between Melancholy and Depression, Philobiblon, 25 (2), pp. 421-9 (2020) (original) (raw)
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Review of Moody Minds Distempered. Essays on melancholy and Depression by Jennifer Radden
Philosophers can be a rather gloomy lot, so ruminations on melancholy have not been foreign to them. The question is how one can approach melancholy -or its modern day successor: depression -in a methodologically sound manner; without, that is, succumbing to a talk full of suggestive ambiguities, ineliminable vagueness, and opaque metaphors, that characterizes much of the writing on such notoriously elusive states. Jennifer Radden has, over many years of original research, produced a series of papers which shows us what the rigorous study of melancholy should look like. By bringing together most of those papers in one volume, O.U.P.
Melancholy and its sisters: transformations of a concept from Homer to Lars von Trier
History of European Ideas, 2021
This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer's print Melencolia I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume's contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists. Since antiquity, few concepts in western discourse have anchored and embodied other ideas so much as melancholy has. Melancholy characterized a host of physical and intellectual phenomena drawn together into a singular identity, with these new characteristics then radiating outwards into medicine , theology, and politics. And vice-versa: melancholy mediated social experiences just as its symptoms and representations simultaneously consolidated them. Writing in 'Trauer und Melancholie' ('Mourning and Melancholy', 1916), Sigmund Freud grasped the central problem of this strangely impressionable quality of melancholy: 'Melancholy, whose definition is volatile even in descriptive psychiatry, occurs in various clinical forms, the combination of which does not appear to be certain, some of which suggest somatic rather than psychogenic affections.' 1 Combinations and constellations hence characterize melancholy just as much as contexts and receptions do. As the contributions to this volume collectively argue, a stable and cumulative iconographic and visual history of melancholy developed across time and space in tandem with divergent literary and medical heritages. 2
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2014
This essay attempts to discuss the relation of mood to philosophy in the context of Benjamin's early thought. Reviewing Ilit Ferber's Melancholy and Philosophy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theatre and Language, I try to show that melancholy, far from merely a psychological-solipsistic-pathological condition as it is generally understood today, is rather to be understood as philosophical attunement and which as such is inseparably connected with profound ethico-political questions concerning responsibility and justice, with work and play and with a possible phenomenological disclosure of the world as a whole. Walter Benjamin's early works are seen, in this context, to be indispensable help to think such questions anew. keywords Walter Benjamin, melancholy, mood Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theatre and Language, Stanford University Press, 2013, 264 pp, $24 . 95 (pbk), ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-8520-4.
The focus or underlying emphasis of this paper is to delve into the formative and initial understanding of melancholy as a phenomenon vis-à-vis philosophical speculations and analytical debates around this terminology, in the medieval period to 18th century. Melancholy as a phenomenon has long been analysed and researched upon to be categorically understood and defined. With advancement in medical sciences, this field further opened up a plethora of case studies, debates and discussions by psychiatrists and medical experts to comprehend it thoroughly. When psychology evolved as an empirical discipline it became distinctly diversified from philosophy over the centuries. Their approach and methodology towards understanding this phenomenon differs a lot and has also altered rapidly and consequently. This paper focuses on philosophical understanding of melancholy during medieval period. While defining aesthetics of sublime Kant also discusses about melancholy. This paper seeks to discuss speculative and initial understanding around melancholy, and also posits it as a distinct aesthetic category. Keywords –Etymological Origin, Ancient& Medieval Understanding, Kant
Brain Research Bulletin, 2011
The relationship between the "passions" (emotions or feelings) and psychopathology has been a constant throughout the history of medicine. In this context, melancholy was considered a perversion of the soul (corruption of the passions). One of the most influential authors on this subject was René Descartes, who discussed it in his work The Treatise on the Passions of the Soul (1649). Descartes believed that "passions" were sensitive movements that the soul experienced due to its union with the body (res extensa). According to this theory, the soul was located in the pineal gland, where it was actively involved in overseeing the functions of the "human machine" and kept its dysfunctions under control, by circulating animal spirits. Descartes described sadness as one of "the six primitive passions of the soul", which leads to melancholy if not remedied. Cartesian theories had a great deal of influence on the way that mental pathologies were considered throughout the entire 17th century (Spinoza, Willis, Pitcairn) and during much of the 18th century (Le Cat, Tissot). From the 19th century onwards, emotional symptomatology finally began to be used in diagnostic criteria for mood disorders.
It is Christmas 2006, Time Magazine proclaims me person of the year. I look at the cover and raise my eyebrows. What? Me? 'Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.' My world. From this Time-issue I may conclude that this is the earthly heaven of the sovereign individual in an intimate embrace with information communication technology. The fruit of this love affair, according to Time, is a world-wide 'social experiment' of energetic, productive, innovative, creative, in short of free spirits. At long last: we are free, we are equals and we are interactive. Adhortations such as those in the Christmas issue of Time, are frequently let loose upon us these days. They are characteristic of a time in which drive and entrepreneurial spirit are considered to be among the highest values. It seems a paradox that encouragement appears to be all the more necessary in this Realm of Freedom. As a consequence this incitement turns into something obsessive, it becomes a somewhat frenetic summons. What is being pursued here and what is it that is being avoided? I hope to address these questions in the following article by allotting a central place to an experience which, in the course of European history, has been understood in various ways and, therefore, has been undergone in various ways, namely: melancholy. A glance at the vicissitudes of this experience may afford a view of the (changing) condition of our culture.