Theories of melancholy in relation to art history have evolved into two discrete though related fields, and changes in the cultural discourse on melancholy have had a distinct impact on visual histories. The most critical element of contemporary
discourse in this field relates to the legacy of Freud’s theory. I re-examine a number of key theoretical texts to explore and speculate as to why the representation of loss appears to be more difficult or different for women than for men in the standard Freudian account of melancholy. As a fine art practitioner I am interested in how this discourse may suggest ways of understanding the representation of women’s
melancholy, and am motivated to consider how these concepts and ideas may help to feed into, shape and frame my studio practice.
‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917)
Freud’s pivotal essay compares the normal process of mourning with the pathological or abnormal condition of melancholia. Freud argues that:
‘mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved one, or to the loss of some abstraction which had taken the place of one, such as the fatherland, liberty, an ideal and so on. In some people the same
influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and consequently we suspect them of a pathological disposition’ (Freud, 1917: 251).
Freud continues that the traits of mourning and melancholia appear similar, with sufferers displaying ‘a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity’ (Ibid. 252).Yet in melancholia the subject displays an additional trait not present in mourning, which he describes as ‘a lowering of the self regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self reproaches and self reviling and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’ (Ibid.).
The work of mourning and the preconditions for melancholia
The work of mourning is, writes Freud, an internal psychic process, an ‘economics of pain’ during which the subject is convinced by the ‘sum of narcissistic
satisfactions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has
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been abolished’ (Ibid. 265). This is achieved ‘bit by bit at great expanse of time and cathectic energy’ via a process of ‘reality testing’ during which ‘each one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected’ until the libido is ‘free and uninhibited’ again (Ibid. 253). This process is painful, suggests Freud, as the libido does not willingly or easily withdraw its attachment from the abolished object; it tries to prolong its existence through memories and associations. Consequently this ‘demand creates an intense opposition’ in the psyche because ‘people never willingly abandon the libidinal position’ and their attachment to the loved object (Freud, 1917: 253). Freud regarded mourning, however difficult for the individual, as part of the normal human
experience. Its work of detaching the libido from the love object is visible to others in the sense that the loss that causes mourning is evident to all.
In melancholy, Freud theorised that the ego is required to undertake similar internal work to mourning, but whereas in mourning nothing impedes the process, ‘this path is blocked for the work of melancholia, owing perhaps to a number of causes or combination of them’ (Ibid.). Freud continues that ‘this presentation is made up of innumerable single impressions (or unconscious traces of them) and this withdrawal of the libido is not a process that can be accomplished in a moment, but must
certainly as in mourning be one in which progress is drawn out and gradual’ (Freud, 1917: 265). What is apparent in melancholia is that ‘first one and then another memory is activated and that the laments which always sound the same and are wearisome in their monotony nevertheless take their rise each time in some
unconscious source’ (Ibid. 266). The ‘location of these separate struggles’ is carried out in the unconscious – ‘the region of the memory traces of things’ (Ibid).
There are, according to Freud, three preconditions within the subject that give rise to melancholy rather than mourning: loss of the object, ambivalence and the ego’s incorporation of the lost object (Ibid. 251).
Loss of the object
First, Freud refers to melancholy as ‘in some way related to object loss which is withdrawn from consciousness in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is
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nothing about the loss that is unconscious’ (Ibid. 254). He adds that the subject can also experience a more ‘intangible sense of loss’, commenting: ‘one feels justified in concluding that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot
consciously perceive what he has lost either. This indeed might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss that has given rise to the melancholia but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him’ (Ibid.). From these points of view we understand the primacy of the unconscious and that
melancholy is equated to the loss of an object, which is ‘unknown’ (Ibid.). This formulation of object loss as something vague and unknown seems to return Freud to an Aristotelian view of melancholy, which, as discussed in Chapter Two, frames melancholy as something elusive, mysterious, unfathomable yet powerful.
Ambivalence
In melancholy the subject’s relation to object loss is complicated by feelings of ambivalence. Freud elaborates that ‘the occasions giving rise to melancholia for the most part extend beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those situations of being wounded, hurt, neglected, out of favour or disappointed, which can import opposite feelings of love and hate into the relationship’ (Ibid. 260).
The presence of ambivalent feelings in the subject ‘makes the process of the ego’s detachment from the lost object more difficult’ (Ibid. 261). This is because
‘countless separate struggles are carried on over the object in which love and hate contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain the position of the libido against the assault’ (Ibid. 266).
According to Freud, ambivalence could be be ‘either constitutional, that is, an
element of every love relation formed by this particular ego or else proceed precisely from those experiences that involved the threat of losing the object’ (Freud, 1917:
265). Hence Freud’s interpretation of ambivalence starts from the internal
‘constitutional factors’, that is, ‘repressed traumatic experiences’ of the subject (Ibid.
266). These experiences will continue to influence ‘real experiences’ of ambivalence (Ibid, 266).
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To fully understand what Freud meant by the phrase ‘repressed traumatic
experiences’ it is necessary to refer to his explanation of the discovery of trauma in pre-pubertal life. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis define trauma in Freud as related to at least two events: ‘in a first scene – the so called scene of seduction – the child is the object of sexual advances from the adult which fails to arouse any sexual
excitement in him. A second scene, occurring after puberty, often of a seemingly innocent nature, evokes the first one through some association. It is the memory of the first scene that occasions an influx of sexual simuli which overhelm the ego’s defenses’(Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973: 467).
Crucially, although Freud called the first scene traumatic, ‘this quality is only ascribed to it “after the fact” nachträglich, or, to put it another way: it is only as a memory that the first scene becomes pathogenic by deferred action in so far as it causes an influx of internal excitation’ (Ibid.).
Incorporation
The concept of incorporation is, in Freud’s view, a key precondition for melancholy.
It refers to a process where the free libido available after the loss of the love object is soaked back up into the ego and the ego identifies with the abandoned object rather than being directed towards a new one, as it would in normal mourning. Hence the free libido is not displaced onto a new object but ‘withdrawn into the ego’ where it
‘served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object’. Thus ‘the shadow of the object fell upon the ego so that the latter could henceforth be criticised by a special mental faculty like the object, like the forsaken object’ (Ibid. 258).Freud writes: ‘in mourning it is the world that has become poor and empty: in melancholy it is the ego itself’ (Ibid. 254).
Freud adds that in a similar way to mourning ‘it is possible for the process in the unconscious to come to an end, either after fury has spent itself or after the object has been abandoned as valueless’ (Ibid. 267).
98 A gendered perspective
It is important to point out that although Freud’s account is foundational, it is also gendered, because having established mourning and melancholy as part of the human condition he uses the case study of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to demonstrate that
melancholy is linked to a tradition in which it is associated with influential and powerful men. Freud writes:
‘A melancholic has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened self criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself;
we only wonder why man has to be ill before he can be accessible to truth of this kind’ (Ibid. 255).
This assumption of a link between elevated powers and melancholy men allows men to experience a form of the condition that transcends normal experience, and which is denied to women. On the other hand, in the same paper, in his three case studies of women Freud treats them as categories: ‘the good conscientious wife’, ‘the jilted bride’ and ‘the self critical wife’, rather than named individuals like Hamlet (Ibid.
253–257).
First there is the case of ‘the good conscious wife who may fall ill of this disease’
(Ibid. 59). As Juliana Schiesari has noted, this example does not seem ‘quite on a par with the gloriously tragic figure of Hamlet’, who is ‘a speaker of truths’ (Schiesari, 1992: 59). Second there is the case of a betrothed girl who has been jilted, whom Freud refers to as having experienced the ‘loss of a more ideal kind’ where ‘the object has perhaps not actually died but become lost as an object’ (Freud, 1917:
253). Finally, Freud refers to the case of ‘the woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such a poor creature as herself’, elaborating that such a woman ‘is really accusing her husband of being incapable’ (Ibid. 257). This self-critical wife expresses her rage by tormenting her husband with her illness but really she is accusing her husband of impotence, and once again she is given neither a name nor the powers of greater self-awareness granted to Hamlet.
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In these examples women’s losses are considered in relation to what they have lost in terms of status within patriarchy, rather than in terms of what these losses mean for women, which remains unspecified. Neither are the women in these case studies attributed with any of the compensatory powers of melancholy; instead their condition remains aligned with the pathological, linked to illness, madness and disease, rather than the cultural condition of creative melancholy established for Hamlet.
Given the proximity between mourning and melancholy in Freud’s account, the question is raised of how melancholy, in contradiction to mourning, might leave its mark in the visual field. Perhaps clues to the pictorial situation for women might be considered from the perspective of how a work of art might ease or hinder the work of mourning and melancholy? If the work of mourning is related to the conscious remembrance of loss, then conceivably works of art provide a place for the
attachment to a lost love to be acknowledged, prolonged, but ultimately severed as Freud proposes. Freud’s analysis also suggests that apprehending melancholy in contrast to mourning in works of art involves making a distinction between conscious and unconscious losses in women, raising the question of whether it is possible to apprehend melancholy in works of art at all, let alone to identify the specificity of women’s experience?
The Oedipus complex and castration
In a series of key texts including ‘The ego and the super-ego’ (1923b), ‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex’ (1924) and ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’ (1925), Freud’s evolving perspective on mourning and melancholia is situated within a discussion about male and female sexuality. This discourse casts some light on Freud’s understanding of the
differences between boys and girls, men and women, and provides an insight into why he regarded the process of representing loss as more difficult for the girl or woman.
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In ‘The ego and the super-ego’ (1923b) Freud presents the concept of the Oedipus complex that provides an account of the loss of the child’s first sexual objects. The concept is significant to the discourse on melancholy because it alters Freud’s theory of the process of the ego’s identification with object loss, by proposing that the process is more significant and more common than he had previously thought. Freud writes: ‘since then we have come to understand that this type of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building what is called character’ (Freud, 1923b: 368).
According to Freud, the loss of sexual objects during the Oedipus complex results in the same ‘alteration of the ego’ and the same ‘setting up of an object inside the ego’
as observed in melancholia, and he even suggests that this event is what makes it possible for ‘the ego to give up its objects’ (Ibid. 368). Thus, ‘especially in the early phases of development the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned objects cathexes and that it contains the history of those object choices’ (Ibid.).Freud insists that ‘whatever the subject’s later capacity for resisting the influences of an object cathexes may turn out to be the effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting’ (Freud, 1923b: 370). Crucially, therefore, the subject’s experience of the loss of these first sexual objects comes to shape
subjectivity itself.
To explain the Oedipus complex Freud refers us back to the myth of Oedipus Rex, the Greek king who, according to myth, killed his father and married his mother. In its simple form it refers to the boy’s desire for the mother as sex object and his jealously towards his father as a rival.50 Initially Freud focuses on the experience of the boy, assuming that the girl’s experience is analogous, although opposite to the boy’s. In this paper Freud deals with the complicating factor of bisexuality.
Bisexuality within the child makes it difficult to ‘obtain a clear view’ of the facts in connection with earlier object choices and identifications, yet the resolution of these conflicting feelings shapes the child’s experience of the Oedipus complex (Ibid.
372). From that point on Freud regarded the complete version of the Oedipus
50 Laplanche and Pontalis note that Freud theorised the complex after recognising in self-analysis his
‘love for his mother, which was in him, alongside a jealousy of his father which conflicted with the affection in which he held him’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973: 283). These insights were combined with other clinical data in his study of dreams in 1900 and major case studies of this period, Dora (1905), Little Hans (1909) and the Rat Man (1909), who provided examples of the complex.
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complex as more problematic than the mythological story in that the presence of instinctual and incestuous desires by the child for both parents (bisexuality) shape the child’s experience of first sexual objects. This means ‘that a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude to his father and an affectionate object choice towards his mother, but at the same time behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate and feminine attitude towards his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother’ (Freud, 1923b: 372).
Dissolution of the Oedipus complex and castration
The Oedipus complex is brought to an end in the boy in Freud’s account by the experience of seeing female genitals, which together with a parental prohibition against masturbation instils a fear of castration in the boy. It is significant, Freud argues in ‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex’ (1924), that the only genital that is acknowledged by both sexes is the penis. Freud writes: ‘we have lately been made more aware than before that a child’s sexual development advances to a certain phase at which the genital organ has already taken over the leading role. But this genital is the male one only, or more correctly, the penis; the female genital has remained undiscovered’ (Freud, 1924: 174). Freud insists that in the boy child, faced with a choice between the loss of his penis and ‘satisfaction of love in the field of the Oedipus complex’, ‘the child’s ego normally turns away from the Oedipus complex’
(Freud, 1924: 176). In other words, the boy child’s ego normally abandons the Oedipus complex because of his narcissistic desire to preserve the penis. This is because, according to Freud, the phallus is an essential component of the child’s self-image, its narcissism, and it explains the severity of the threat of castration.
The role of the castration complex in the boy is therefore to provoke the terminal crisis of the Oedipus complex, and has the effect of placing a prohibition upon the child’s maternal object. The threat of castration means that, for the boy, the Oedipus complex is not just repressed but literally crushed, and incestuous wishes towards the parental objects are replaced by identifications, especially with the father, via the
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formation of the super ego.51 Hence the boy emerges from the Oedipus complex with a strong superego.
The Oedipus complex, castration and the girl
Freud acknowledged that ‘in general our insight into these developmental processes in girls is unsatisfactory, incomplete and vague’ (Freud, 1924: 179). However, in a series of theoretical papers including ‘Some psychical anatomical differences between the sexes’ (1925a), ‘Female sexuality’ (1931), and ‘The psychology of women’ (1933) he moved on to address the experience of the girl in the Oedipus complex.
According to Freud’s account the girl’s first object of love is, like the boy, the
mother, but whereas the boy retains that object in the Oedipus complex, the girl must transfer her love to her father. Freud asks: ‘How does it happen that girls abandon it and takes their father as its object’? (Freud, 1925a: 251). The answer for Freud is to be found in the events that take place in the pre-Oedipal phase of a girl’s
development that lead up to her entry into the Oedipus complex.
development that lead up to her entry into the Oedipus complex.