E-Book Overview
Spanning 24 centuries, this anthology collects over thirty selections of important Western writing about melancholy and its related conditions by philosophers, doctors, religious and literary figures, and modern psychologists. Truly interdisciplinary, it is the first such anthology. As it traces Western attitudes, it reveals a conversation across centuries and continents as the authors interpret, respond, and build on each other's work. Editor Jennifer Radden provides an extensive, in-depth introduction that draws links and parallels between the selections, and reveals the ambiguous relationship between these historical accounts of melancholy and today's psychiatric views on depression. This important new collection is also beautifully illustrated with depictions of melancholy from Western fine art.
E-Book Content
THE NATURE OF MELANCHOLY
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THE NATURE OF MELANCHOLY
From Aristotle to Kristeva
Edited by Jennifer Radden
OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc. First published in 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2002 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The nature of melancholy : from Aristotle to Kristeva / edited by Jennifer Radden. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-512962-8; 0-19-515165-8 (pbk.) i. Melancholy. I. Radden, Jennifer. BF575-M44N38 2000 152.4—dc2i 99-16828
3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
To my children, Tristram, Beatrice, and Patrick
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Preface
F
OR MOST OF western European history, melancholy was a central cultural idea, focusing, explaining, and organizing the way people saw the world and one another and framing social, medical, and epistemological norms. Today, in contrast, it is an insignificant category, of little interest to medicine or psychology, and without explanatory or organizing vitality. In homage to its past, I have gathered here selections from some of the most influential sources on melancholy in the long tradition preceding Freud's 1917 "Mourning and Melancholia," an essay that ushers in a new type of theorizing and represents, in certain respects, the completion of this tradition. These texts on melancholic states form the centerpiece of the book. (The terms melancholic state, melancholy, and melancholia are not distinguished in the following discussion; nor were they, in any consistent way, in past writing.) But I have also included a small number of later twentieth-century discussion on clinical depression. Writing about melancholy has customarily been broad, directed not only toward defining but also toward remedying melancholy dispositions, states, and conditions. Some of these prescriptions make for interesting reading, and others are closely related to the nature and causes of melancholy. However, I chose the excerpts and texts that follow to introduce conceptual questions about melancholy—what it is, rather than what to do about it. My emphasis is on the ca