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Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva
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.
373 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 9, 2021
An interesting read chronicling the understanding and treatment of mood disorders in the West. We often think of psychiatry being conjured from the nether by Freud sometime in the 19th century. The Nature of Melancholy blows apart this idea by cataloging a series of texts from the Plato to the present showing how ideas around mood disorders have changed. The editor does an excellent job of contextualizing each piece by way of a short introduction summarizing the world that the specific author lived and the general intellectual currents of the epoch. The only drawback comes in the middle of the book, where the editor includes a large number of repetitive texts from the early modern and late medieval period that increasingly dense to get though, going on and on about humoral medical theory.
March 10, 2009
"There are times for being dumb.
This must be one of them.
I'd like to know what's so wrong,
with a stupid happy song?"
The third song, on their third album, (the last album they would make before the naughty words of sell-out and corporate whores were thrown their way) Jawbreaker have this kind of simple song that seems to be taking aim at their detractors, people who thought they were going soft or whatever. The narrator of the song is unreliable, one can think that it's Blake telling people he doesn't care what they think, but half way through the song where this line falls the narrator instead seems to be sneering at the record industry that's more interested in sales then integrity. There is also the problem that the song isn't a happy song it's a fuck you song. Mentally perusing their catalog they actually don't have any happy songs, the closest thing to one would be Chesterfield Kings, incidentally the third song off of their second album, but that is more a song of neurotic longing and smoking, and even though the song ends nicely with making out and watching TV anyone familiar with Jawbreaker knows that this is only going to lead to a bitter memory and fodder for a future song.
Why am I going on about this? I don't know why, maybe because the line kept running through my head while I was thinking of writing this review. They also happen to be a band that as I mentioned don't have any 'happy songs' and they are one of my favorite bands. Without exception all of my favorite bands sing predominately unhappy songs. In one of my first appointments with my current shrink he asked me about what kind of music I listened to, and I gave him some kind of answer, but I added that I mainly listen to depressing music. He asked why, and I told him that you just don't normally find literate and interesting happy songs.
I believe that to be true. I'd extend it to books too. One of the more difficult questions to answer is when someone asks for a happy book. Actually that isn't so difficult, but it is more difficult when someone is fishing for a personal recommendation of my favorite happy book, or a happy love story. I don't know how to answer that question. I don't read happy books, it's not that I go out of my way looking for depressing shit to read (ok, that's a lie, I do. But I have other criteria for books too.), it's just that happy books are probably mostly crap that I'm not interested in. Who writes happy books? People who generally want to make money? I don't know. The idea of spending countless hours alone in front of a computer typing, or scribbling in a notebook while life is going on around you, doesn't seem like a normal activity that well adjusted happy people would want to engage in unless they were solely out to make a buck. Anything done solely for money is immediately suspect, and the quality that will come from anything being done only for money will be above-average cookie cutter at best.
I don't personally know what happy people do. I don't know if I know any. I suspect they might just spend most of their time lying to themselves and covering up the abyss of life with pointless activities like traveling and going to the beach, but maybe they are doing better things and there is no abyss for them.
Why am I going on like this still? I don't know still. This book is a series of essays about melancholy from Aristotle to a couple of doctors who specilize in the chemistry of the brain. I don't know if I like that the title of book lies to me. Julia Kristeva is the penultimate person presented in the book. But I guess the subtitle wouldn't sound so good if it read From Aristotle to a couple doctors you most likely never heard of and aren't nearly as sexy sounding as a melancholic French intellectual who is one of Derrida's buddies. Besides the book's subtitle being a lie, I think that the book kind doesn't prove what it set out to, mainly something about the changing ways that melancholy has been understood throughout the ages. Sure the Greeks thought that it was created by an abundance of the black humors, aka bile, in the body and that it was secreted by the spleen and that depending upon it being hot or cold we are either manic or depressed. We can point and laugh at the silliness of things like that now because we know that it's instead other magical chemicals that are secreted from other parts of the body in the head that affect moods, and that by lowering or raising their receptivity a person can be magically fixed, all mental baggage still in tact but kind of locked behind a wall in your head. Fucking stupid Greeks lacking their high powered scientific instruments and thinking that we are just a bundle of chemicals, I mean humors, when it comes to our mental stability.
I sound kind of flippant but the point that I saw in the book was that except for the moments when Freud and his sort really got going, the entire understanding of melancholy was essentially mechanical, the understanding of how things go on in the body may have improved but the basic underlying ideas are exactly the same, or the basic epistemology is the same. One which I'd say is completely flawed and even somewhat fascist in nature, but that is another rant all together.
I'll stop going on tangents and say that I liked the book. I find reading about melancholy to be almost as fun as reading depressing novels. Maybe I shouldn't be reading books like this for the same reason that a hypochondriac shouldn't read medical books listing symptoms of diseases. I find myself relating to too much that is said in here, and that's not exactly healthy. I had to keep reminding myself that some of what I was relating to myself was actually just normal functioning of a person, and that of course sometimes I'll be like (X), but unless it's a dominate way that I always am, then it's not a problem.
The other interesting part of the book was looking at the way that melancholy was thought of in relation to genius throughout the ages. It swings like a pendulum, with people like Aristotle and the Romantics believing it is something tied with genius, to more 'rational' and 'scientific' ages which see it as a disease that maybe decent stuff can come out of but never anything that could be considered brilliance (one essay even goes so far as to say that Shakespeare and Goethe are perfect examples that genius and melancholy can not exist together, because neither of these two men could have created what they did if they had been stricken with depression. Oh really? I never met either of these two, but happy and well adjusted aren't the words that come to mind when I think of them, maybe I'm wrong again though).
So where was I? This book isn't nearly as satisfying as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but then it's more of a primer or introduction to depression, and not a full fledged all engrossing masterpiece of melancholy.
This must be one of them.
I'd like to know what's so wrong,
with a stupid happy song?"
The third song, on their third album, (the last album they would make before the naughty words of sell-out and corporate whores were thrown their way) Jawbreaker have this kind of simple song that seems to be taking aim at their detractors, people who thought they were going soft or whatever. The narrator of the song is unreliable, one can think that it's Blake telling people he doesn't care what they think, but half way through the song where this line falls the narrator instead seems to be sneering at the record industry that's more interested in sales then integrity. There is also the problem that the song isn't a happy song it's a fuck you song. Mentally perusing their catalog they actually don't have any happy songs, the closest thing to one would be Chesterfield Kings, incidentally the third song off of their second album, but that is more a song of neurotic longing and smoking, and even though the song ends nicely with making out and watching TV anyone familiar with Jawbreaker knows that this is only going to lead to a bitter memory and fodder for a future song.
Why am I going on about this? I don't know why, maybe because the line kept running through my head while I was thinking of writing this review. They also happen to be a band that as I mentioned don't have any 'happy songs' and they are one of my favorite bands. Without exception all of my favorite bands sing predominately unhappy songs. In one of my first appointments with my current shrink he asked me about what kind of music I listened to, and I gave him some kind of answer, but I added that I mainly listen to depressing music. He asked why, and I told him that you just don't normally find literate and interesting happy songs.
I believe that to be true. I'd extend it to books too. One of the more difficult questions to answer is when someone asks for a happy book. Actually that isn't so difficult, but it is more difficult when someone is fishing for a personal recommendation of my favorite happy book, or a happy love story. I don't know how to answer that question. I don't read happy books, it's not that I go out of my way looking for depressing shit to read (ok, that's a lie, I do. But I have other criteria for books too.), it's just that happy books are probably mostly crap that I'm not interested in. Who writes happy books? People who generally want to make money? I don't know. The idea of spending countless hours alone in front of a computer typing, or scribbling in a notebook while life is going on around you, doesn't seem like a normal activity that well adjusted happy people would want to engage in unless they were solely out to make a buck. Anything done solely for money is immediately suspect, and the quality that will come from anything being done only for money will be above-average cookie cutter at best.
I don't personally know what happy people do. I don't know if I know any. I suspect they might just spend most of their time lying to themselves and covering up the abyss of life with pointless activities like traveling and going to the beach, but maybe they are doing better things and there is no abyss for them.
Why am I going on like this still? I don't know still. This book is a series of essays about melancholy from Aristotle to a couple of doctors who specilize in the chemistry of the brain. I don't know if I like that the title of book lies to me. Julia Kristeva is the penultimate person presented in the book. But I guess the subtitle wouldn't sound so good if it read From Aristotle to a couple doctors you most likely never heard of and aren't nearly as sexy sounding as a melancholic French intellectual who is one of Derrida's buddies. Besides the book's subtitle being a lie, I think that the book kind doesn't prove what it set out to, mainly something about the changing ways that melancholy has been understood throughout the ages. Sure the Greeks thought that it was created by an abundance of the black humors, aka bile, in the body and that it was secreted by the spleen and that depending upon it being hot or cold we are either manic or depressed. We can point and laugh at the silliness of things like that now because we know that it's instead other magical chemicals that are secreted from other parts of the body in the head that affect moods, and that by lowering or raising their receptivity a person can be magically fixed, all mental baggage still in tact but kind of locked behind a wall in your head. Fucking stupid Greeks lacking their high powered scientific instruments and thinking that we are just a bundle of chemicals, I mean humors, when it comes to our mental stability.
I sound kind of flippant but the point that I saw in the book was that except for the moments when Freud and his sort really got going, the entire understanding of melancholy was essentially mechanical, the understanding of how things go on in the body may have improved but the basic underlying ideas are exactly the same, or the basic epistemology is the same. One which I'd say is completely flawed and even somewhat fascist in nature, but that is another rant all together.
I'll stop going on tangents and say that I liked the book. I find reading about melancholy to be almost as fun as reading depressing novels. Maybe I shouldn't be reading books like this for the same reason that a hypochondriac shouldn't read medical books listing symptoms of diseases. I find myself relating to too much that is said in here, and that's not exactly healthy. I had to keep reminding myself that some of what I was relating to myself was actually just normal functioning of a person, and that of course sometimes I'll be like (X), but unless it's a dominate way that I always am, then it's not a problem.
The other interesting part of the book was looking at the way that melancholy was thought of in relation to genius throughout the ages. It swings like a pendulum, with people like Aristotle and the Romantics believing it is something tied with genius, to more 'rational' and 'scientific' ages which see it as a disease that maybe decent stuff can come out of but never anything that could be considered brilliance (one essay even goes so far as to say that Shakespeare and Goethe are perfect examples that genius and melancholy can not exist together, because neither of these two men could have created what they did if they had been stricken with depression. Oh really? I never met either of these two, but happy and well adjusted aren't the words that come to mind when I think of them, maybe I'm wrong again though).
So where was I? This book isn't nearly as satisfying as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but then it's more of a primer or introduction to depression, and not a full fledged all engrossing masterpiece of melancholy.
May 17, 2018
An impressive history of psychology/psychiatry monograph on the history of how physicians, psychoanalysts, psychologists, neuroscientists, even poets have conceived of melancholy (and as you will learn this is not the same thing as depression). Wide-ranging from history, from (probably) Aristotle to neuroscientists working today and everyone in between. There is an introductory essay that is well worth-reading, and each "theorist of the melancholy" has their own short contextual piece with a short explication, then an excerpt from a work of theirs. I admit, I skipped most of the excerpts sans Kant's, Freud's, Kristeva's, Baudelaire's, and Keats's. I am interested in the history of melancholy but not interested enough to see how it developed precisely (though it probably would have been helpful for me to have read Kraepelin, Klein, and perhaps the maybe-Aristotle).
Big recommendation for anyone interested in the history of how scholars have conceived and treated melancholia or in a history of medicine in general.
Big recommendation for anyone interested in the history of how scholars have conceived and treated melancholia or in a history of medicine in general.
April 24, 2008
i really enjoyed the history of various theories, beliefs, superstitions and other assumptions re this emotion/nature/personality
May 2, 2015
Rewarding and interesting journey through centuries of melancholy essays.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews