Modernist Melancholia

Freud, Conrad and Ford

Anne Enderwitz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137444325
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modernist Melancholia explores modernism's melancholic roots through the detailed discussion of writings by Freud, Conrad and Ford. Melancholia ties modernism to the 19th-century obsession with loss and continuity and, at the same time, constitutes a formative moment in the history of 20th-century literature, modern subjectivity and critical theory

1

Freud’s Melancholic Subject

Freud’s contribution to the history of melancholia has long been recognised. His brilliant essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) represents a milestone in the long tradition of writings on melancholia. Freud’s careful description of the symptoms of melancholia is as vivid and detailed as the accounts of famous Renaissance scholars such as Marsilio Ficino, Robert Burton and Timothie Bright. At the same time, Freud’s singular focus on the relation of mourning and melancholia and his analysis of the role of identification are unique in the history of melancholia. They did not, however, emerge out of nowhere. Freud’s thoughts on melancholia took shape in the context of nineteenth-century sciences such as evolutionary theory and archaeology and were influenced by the long history of melancholia dating back to antiquity. This chapter unravels these legacies and presents a detailed analysis of the triad of loss, desire and appropriation that forms the core of Freud’s theory of melancholia. Reassessing Freud’s work from a historical perspective invites a methodological shift that brings The Ego and the Id into focus, another key text on melancholia that has not yet received the attention that it deserves. The reason for this neglect may be that The Ego and the Id does not primarily look at the clinical picture of melancholia but concentrates instead on the general set-up of the ego. In this text Freud mines the insights derived from his study of melancholia for their structural implications. He links melancholic identification with the genesis of ego and ego-ideal. Reading ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ together with The Ego and the Id demonstrates clearly that Freud’s study of pathological melancholia advanced a theory of subjectivity. Freud is often viewed as a modernist writer, but his work on melancholia shows how evenly he is poised between nineteenth-century sciences and a more modern understanding of subjectivity and desire as constructed in and through narrative. Fin-de-siècle modernist literary authors occupy a similar in-between position. In their concern with narrative, time, desire and subjectivity, Freud, Conrad and Ford clearly belong to the same historical and cultural moment. Their shared evolutionary-archaeological viewpoint is a nineteenth-century heritage and their common interest in the relation between narrative and consciousness leads the way into the twentieth century. A better understanding of their common basis helps to explain why Freud appears to theorise in his writings on melancholia the very condition that Conrad and Ford evoke in narrative.

Freud intended to publish his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ as part of a series of essays entitled ‘Preliminaries to a Metapsychology’. It was meant ‘to clarify and carry deeper the theoretical assumptions on which a psycho-analytic system could be founded’ (1917a, vol. 14, p. 222, footnote 1). As a detailed study of the symptoms of mourning and melancholia, the meta-dimension of this essay may not be obvious. It emerges more clearly when we look beyond Freud’s detailed comparison with mourning and focus on the complex dynamics between the melancholic subject and its loved object. The melancholic’s identification with the loved object promises insights into the general set-up of the ego. Two insights are particularly important in the context of Freud’s essay. The essay first elaborates on the ego-ideal as a critical agency, a concept which Freud had introduced a little earlier in his paper ‘On Narcissism’. Second, it introduces identification as a paradoxical relation that is constitutive of but also interferes with the integrity of the ego. A few years later in The Ego and the Id (1923), identification becomes the driving force in the constitution of character.

Freud wrote ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ at a time when the concept of melancholia had lost its role as an umbrella term for various psychological pathologies and had been largely superseded by depression in psychiatric discourse. The gradual shrinking of melancholia as a concept and its final replacement by ‘depression’ can be witnessed in the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin’s textbook, which appeared first as Compendium der Psychiatrie (1883) and then in numerous editions as Short Textbook or Textbook. In the early twentieth century, Kraepelin was extremely influential. In the early editions of his textbook, melancholia constituted an independent category. It was an illness proper that took different forms (melancholia simplex, activa, or attonita) and denoted the depressive form of the so-called periodic psychoses. In the fifth edition of Kraepelin’s textbook (1896) melancholia was replaced by ‘depression’ and subsumed under the larger category, das periodische Irresein (periodic insanity), together with mania and so-called circular forms of insanity. The term melancholia was used only for a specific depressive disease of the involutional period. In the sixth and seventh editions (1899 and 1904), the category of periodic insanity was retermed manisch-depressives Irresein (manic-depressive insanity). Again, only the melancholia of the involutional period remained a separate condition. After a clinical study by Georges L. Dreyfus in 1907, which argued that involutional melancholia was not an independent disease but should be classified under manic-depressive psychosis, Kraepelin finally abandoned the idea of melancholia as a distinct disease. In the eighth edition of his textbook (1909), Kraepelin no longer recognised melancholia of the involutional period as an independent disease and thus he used melancholia and depression interchangeably to denote the depressive forms of manic-depressive insanity. A contemporary of Kraepelin, American psychiatrist Adolf Meyer argued explicitly for ‘eliminating the term melancholia’ (Meyer qtd. in Jackson, 1986, p. 198) and replacing it with ‘depression’. To him, melancholia appeared both ill-defined and obscurantist: it ‘implied a knowledge of something that we did not possess’ and ‘had been employed in different specific ways by different writers’ (Meyer qtd. in Jackson, 1986, p. 198). For Meyer, depression was the more ‘unassuming’ term (Meyer qtd. in Jackson, 1986, p. 198).

Considering the psychiatric background of the time and its discontent with melancholia, it is significant that Freud retained the term although he realised very well when he wrote ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that its ‘definition fluctuate(d) even in descriptive psychiatry’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 243). Freud’s decision for melancholia indicates his desire to claim a place in the long tradition of discourses on melancholia. His description of melancholia is informed by many famous writers who had dealt with the subject in the past, from Aristotle to the Persian doctor and philosopher Avicenna, the neo-Platonist scholar Ficino and the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton. The clinical picture described by Freud was in many ways similar to psychiatric descriptions by Kraepelin and Meyer, yet his essay drew on the ancients as well. The melancholic’s ‘keener eye for the truth’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 246), which Freud maintained in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, harks back to Renaissance discourses on the melancholic genius, which, in turn, are indebted to Aristotle. Freud even quoted Shakespeare’s paradigmatic melancholic hero Hamlet: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 246, footnote 1). Indeed, with the realisation that melancholia resembles closely the affect of mourning but that it appears to lack a cause, Freud used an ancient insight as starting point for his argument. Burton had already described melancholy men as ‘sad and fearful’ but ‘without a cause’ (1948, vol. 1, p. 385). When Freud compared mourning, as a normal reaction to the loss of a loved object, with melancholia, as a prolonged and seemingly unfounded state of sadness, he drew on the venerable discursive history of melancholia. Yet the twist he gave to the problem of cause was quite original. Freud inferred from the symptoms of melancholic patients that they, too, process the loss of a loved object, even if this loss is not evident. Freud’s fascinating idea was that the melancholic reacts to loss by identifying with the desired object, thus recreating the object in the medium of his or her own self.

This argument builds on the work of Freud’s pupil Karl Abraham, who described identification with the object in graphic terms as an act of incorporation (Einverleibung). It was Freud himself, however, who offered the complex, absorbing description of the triad of desire, loss and incorporation that characterises his theory of melancholia. As the evolution of his ideas on melancholia in The Ego and the Id demonstrates, Freud understood the double-edged nature of this process: where the self becomes the medium for resurrecting the object, the object impinges on the subject’s boundaries, transforming the self forever. Freud elaborated on this idea of subjectivity that is constituted by loss and desire further in his meta-psychological study The Ego and the Id. Melancholic identification becomes here a necessary feature of any child’s development because it contributes to the making of the superego. This evolution of the argument from a pathological condition to the norm is typically Freudian. Freud arrives in The Ego and the Id at a refined version of normal development, one that has been expanded to include insights from the study of pathological melancholia. The focus of this chapter will be on this development and its implications for melancholia and subjectivity.

From ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ to The Ego and the Id

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud explained the symptoms of melancholic patients in terms of a specific reaction to the loss of a loved object. With one exception, those symptoms correspond to the affective state of mourning: ‘The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 244). Of all these symptoms, only ‘The disturbance of self-regard’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 244) is not a typical feature of mourning. Close attention to this symptom provides the ‘key to the clinical picture’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 248) of melancholia. The ‘melancholic’s many and various self-accusations’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 248) and the openness with which melancholic patients voice their self-reproaches are conspicuous. They can only be explained through the complex dynamics of identification. The self-reproaches are really reproaches against the loved object, only they ‘have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 248). This curious constellation has become possible through the ego’s identification with the loved object. Freud and Abraham described the internalising movement of melancholic identification in terms of a narcissistic regression. Libidinal energy is withdrawn from the outside world and directed towards the self, where it serves the resurrection of the object. ‘[A]n object-cathexis’, as Freud stated later in The Ego and the Id, ‘has been replaced by an identification’ (1923b, vol. 19, p. 28). Freud’s claim in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that in melancholia the ego is ‘poor and empty’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 246) appears to contradict the notion of narcissistic regression that describes the redirection of libidinal energy towards the self. In Freud’s theory of melancholia, however, the influx of libido cannot strengthen the ego because it serves the internalisation of the loved object as a lost object: ‘the ego contracts something of the loss or abandonment by which the object is now marked’ (Butler, 1997, p. 187). Internalisation of the object also entails the incorporation of the conflicting affects that characterise one’s relation with the object. The ambivalence towards the object now concerns the self: ‘The ego not only brings the object inside but brings aggression against the object along with it’ (Butler, 1997, p. 186). This enforces the objectification of the ego that is now persecuted by a ‘special agency’, the ego-ideal: ‘Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego’, as Freud wrote in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, ‘and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 249).

The ambivalence towards the desired object consists in feelings of love and hate: ‘countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position against the assault’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 256). Freud suggested that the ambivalence towards the object that becomes evident in self-deprecating remarks is either ‘constitutional, i.e. is an element of every love-relation formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely from those experiences that involved the threat of losing the object’ (1917c, vol. 14, p. 256). Butler suggests another possibility according to which melancholic ambivalence is produced by the failure of the ego to substitute successfully for the object: ‘The ego is a poor substitute for the lost object, and its failure to substitute in a way that satisfies (that is, to overcome its status as a substitution), leads to the ambivalence that distinguishes melancholia’ (Butler, 1997, p. 169).

The identification with or incorporation of the loved object in melancholia has a prehistory in the oral phase in ontogenetic development. Karl Abraham, who wrote about melancholia before Freud, had drawn an explicit connection between melancholic introjection and the cannibalistic appropriation of the object in the oral phase. The term introjection was first introduced in a paper by Sàndor Ferenczi, ‘Introjection and Transference’ (1909), where Ferenczi developed it in opposition to projection. Introjection refers to an expansion of the ego by means of importing objects. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, introjection is an imaginary process: ‘in phantasy, the subject transposes objects and their inherent qualities from the “outside” to the “inside” of himself’ (1973, p. 229), turning them into a part of the self. Abraham’s ‘The First Pregenital Stage of the Libido’ draws an explicit connection between starvation and melancholia, emphasising the structural link between taking in the object and eating. Abraham ascribed here ‘unconscious cannibalistic impulses’ (1927d, p. 278) to the melancholic. In his later essay ‘A Short Study of the Development of the Libido’, which appeared after Freud’s essay on melancholia in 1924, Abraham stated the link between introjection and the oral phase explicitly: ‘the introjection of the love-object is an incorporation [Einverleibung] of it, in keeping with the regression of the libido to the cannibalistic level’ (1927b, p. 420).

Freud confirmed the connection between melancholia and the oral phase and linked it to the dynamics of identification. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, he described identification as an expression of the desire to incorporate the object:

We have elsewhere shown that identification is the preliminary stage of object-choice, that it is the first way – and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion – in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate [einverleiben] this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it. Abraham is undoubtedly right in attributing to this connection the refusal of nourishment met with in severe forms of melancholia. (1917c, vol. 14, pp. 249–50)

The German verb einverleiben (to incorporate) can literally mean to swallow up, as in eating, but is also used to describe other forms of assimilating an object, as in absorbing or annexing. Like the German Leib, the Latin corpus in the English translation ‘incorporation’ implies that another body absorbs an object. Freud himself forged the link between ‘identification’ and ‘appropriation’ in his early work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In the German edition, Freud described hysterical identification as Aneignung (1900a, vol. 2/3, p. 155) of a symptom on the basis of ‘a similar aetiological pretension’ (1900b, vol. 4, p. 150). The English translation of the Standard Edition uses here the word ‘assimilation’ (1900b, vol. 4, p. 150). In a slightly different context, the English translation of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s work Le sujet freudien uses the term ‘appropriation’ as the more literal translation of Aneignung (1989, p. 14), the ‘proper’ corresponding to the German eigen in its sense of denoting possession by a particular person. Both assimilation and appropriation link identification with ownership and draw attention to the complex relationship of being someone and having someone: in identifying with an object one makes it one’s own. Both terms draw attention to the permeable boundaries between self and other that identification draws on.

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, the unconscious identification with the loved object is the defining mark of the melancholic condition and provides its unique and distinctive characteristic in comparison with the normal affect of mourning. In The Ego and the Id, Freud posited identification with objects of desire that have been given up as the very process by which the ego is formed. It is ‘possible’, he wrote, ‘to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices’ (1923b, vol. 19, p. 29). It is a huge step from maintaining that the loss of a loved object may lead to identification, to claiming that the character of any ego is the effect of processing loss. What begins quite innocently as an analysis of the melancholic condition leads to a basic principle of the constitution of subjectivity: the ego’s character results from identification with lost love-objects. The same is true for the ‘critical agency’ that Freud mentioned briefly in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Already here, Freud identified this critical agency as a part of the ego. In The Ego and the Id Freud called this agency ‘ego-ideal’ or ‘super-ego’. He argued that the super-ego is primarily the product of identification with the parents. Not unlike the ego, it is at least partly the result of melancholic identifications, for it is prompted by having to give the parents up as objects of desire. In fact, the ego-ideal is really a part of the ego, which has a special position only because it comprises the very first identifications. The ego-ideal therefore has a double role in Freud’s theory of melancholia. It persecutes the ego in its melancholic identifications and is itself a relict of past attachments that had to be given up.

How did Freud arrive at this interpretation of the ego-ideal as resulting, at least in part, from melancholic identifications with the parents? In the third chapter of The Ego and the Id Freud discussed the little boy’s identification with his father as the ‘more normal’ (1923b, vol. 19, p. 32) outcome of the Oedipus complex. This corresponds to the familiar version of the Oedipus complex that pervades contemporary culture. The boy desires his mother, but ultimately identifies with his father when he gives up his mother as an object of desire under the threat of castration. As Freud wrote in his lecture ‘The Development of the Libido’ (1917), the desire for the mother does not completely disappear but becomes latent. It is resurrected in puberty and finally transferred onto a substitute object (1917b, vol. 16, pp. 336–7).¹ The stronger identification with the father goes hand in hand with the latency of desire: the little boy has to give up on the mother in the present but, according to Freud’s narrative of a later transfer of desire onto a substitute object, he can expect future gratification.

Freud’s careful qualification – ‘more normal’ – indicates that the matter is really more complex. This becomes obvious when Freud concedes that boys sometimes also identify with the mother object that they had to give up (1923b, vol. 19, p. 32). In his discussion in this chapt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Freud’s Melancholic Subject
• 2 Primitivism and Meaning in Heart of Darkness
• 3 Desire, Loss and Storytelling in The Good Soldier
• 4 From Melancholia to Wish-Fulfilment: The Inheritors and Romance
• Conclusion: Modernist Melancholia and Its Afterlife
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index