Melancholyby Carina del Valle Schorske (http://thepointmag.com/author/carinadelvalledschorske) in Examined Life (http://thepointmag.com/category/examined-life)

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Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition

we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the

earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make

use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact

synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We

keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new

words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection

Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes,

who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block.

They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all

“melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of

her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy

distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the

charms of melancholy?

There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and

genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne

confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this

raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain,

Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction

that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but

somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be

the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-

portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the

surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his

yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work

become the charms of his persona and his predicament.

But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always

and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s

discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to

the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,”

choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard,

despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more

like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something

in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the

depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease

seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of

romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar

over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of

depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy.

But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a

final solution.

Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the

one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of

depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential

attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her

intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking

pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of

insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for

herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate

person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates

between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a

mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking

resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.

●

When I was a child I had a strong curiosity regarding depression, as well as a

disdain for it that I learned from my family the way other children learn

disdain for the poor. All of my grandparents were either medicated or self-

medicating for mood disorders, and my mother watched me tensely, my

crybaby ways on the playground, the grave faces on my colored pencil

portraits, my mock burials in the sandbox. No shadow that crossed my face

escaped her eye: “Well, why are you being bullied? And did you tell the

teacher? If you’re unhappy, we’ll switch schools. Do you want to stay

somewhere that makes you miserable?” I think she meant to soothe my

natural sadness before it had the chance to trigger the brooding alcoholic

latent in my genome. Solutionism: mostly practical, but also spiritual. Both

my mother and father were heavily engaged in a religious community that

promised nothing short of enlightenment, and my earliest picture book

—What to Remember to Be Happy—was authored by their guru. I preferred

Snow White and Rose Red, the mesmerizing tale of an ungrateful gnome and a

girl who falls in love with a bear.

It was this rhetorical environment that made me think of depressed people

as those sorry souls who refused heaven, who didn’t want to find solutions

for their feelings. Or else people who, through no fault of their own, lived

lives so freighted with violence, responsibility and structural inequality that

any resolution would require a revolution. My mother suggested that her own

mother—an orphaned immigrant—fell into this category. I did not. On the

whole I wanted to be a good girl, and grateful. I didn’t want to be an

impossible problem. But it didn’t seem to me that feeling a little sad, or even

very sad, made me a problem, and I was both eager and afraid for the day

when I would be free to allow my melancholy to play itself out on its own

schedule.

In high school I loved Joni Mitchell, her face all mountain crag and shadow on

the CD jacket for Blue. And on the title track, her lyrics: “Everybody’s saying

that hell’s the hippest way to go / Well I don’t think so / But I’m gonna take a

look around.” This is a cautious woman, skeptical of the melodrama of

melancholy, its “hipness.” Even though I felt at home in those words, I hated

the lost, spiraling minor descent her voice made into the void. In his first

published short story, “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the

Bad Thing,” David Foster Wallace describes the feeling of depression as “like

being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at

which it hits you that there is no surface for you, that you’re just going to

drown in there no matter which way you swim.” Joni Mitchell’s voice was

adrift in the world Wallace describes. I couldn’t get my bearings, even when I

tried to hook my ear to a note in the middle, the way you’re told to spit if

you’re caught rolling in a riptide and don’t know which way is air, and breath,

and life. So I would usually listen to the first few seconds and skip to the next

track, called “California,” which reminded me where I was, just north of San

Francisco. And even though I couldn’t stand listening to “Blue,” I envied its

making, which I fantasized as a radical gesture of emotional independence.

Indeed when I (inevitably?) fell into a “clinical depression” myself, one of my

few pleasures was the imperviousness of my pain to my mother’s advice.

Alone—and with my long-distance boyfriend, who was saved from my vacant

gaze by the pixelated imperfection of our Skype connection—I was classically

self-loathing. Freud noticed that the 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 … that he has come pretty near to understanding

himself.” And indeed, I spoke with a kind of confidence to my mother

regarding my condition, demonstrating the “insistent communicativeness”

of the melancholic, “which finds satisfaction in self-exposure.” This is the

kind of meaning words like “satisfaction” come to have in this state of

emergency. “Satisfaction” is the right to remain underwater when your

mother is fishing for you with her golden line.

The state of emergency lasted for about twenty months. Even now it’s hard to

say when it began, and harder still to say when it ended—the psychic pain

has subsided asymptotically, and today I hover near normal like a high-

speed train over electrically charged tracks. But I know better than to

minimize the difference between those twenty months and a bad mood now.

When I think about that period, I don’t remember much beyond my bedroom.

I remember the bedbug infestation. I remember how the pictures shook on

the wall when the policeman came knocking at my door to make sure I wasn’t

“missing.” And I remember the window, especially at night when I couldn’t

see past my own reflection through to the elm tree outside. I remember

enough to feel afraid of going back there; even writing much about that

period seems inadvisable. And yet I see my mind circle the scene, as though

there’s something to be scavenged. As though the depression could show me

something other than my weaknesses.

●

Freud was not a romantic, despite his affection for the poetry of Goethe and

Rilke, and he was certainly not a romantic in his vision of psychological

suffering. Many of his patients were in serious trouble—the kind of trouble

that prevents you from shitting without the aid of an enema, or makes you

think you’re pregnant when you’re a virgin (these examples, it bears

mentioning, come from his early cases). Freud’s aim was to cure—to

alleviate the symptoms that his patients dropped like dead birds at his

doorstep. But he knew that his patients, the sort of people that didn’t feel

they “fit in” with Viennese society, were not the only ones leaving morbid

gifts. Freud didn’t romanticize sickness, but much more radically, he didn’t

romanticize normalness: “Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on

the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or

other.” He placed every human psyche on the same continuum; in his

estimation the “normal” fascination of the lover with an article of his

beloved’s clothing shades into the shoe fetishist’s obsession. Insofar as any

of us are capable of insight or knowledge, the crazy are just as capable as the

sane. We all have reasons for doing what we do, however buried or byzantine.

Still, I’ve always found Freud’s landmark essay “Mourning and Melancholia”

difficult to follow. He gets some things so right—what melancholy looks and

feels like, how its symptoms show up. But the central claim is strange: Freud

argues that all of the self-reproaches so typical of the melancholic, even if

they seem justified, are secretly and truly reproaches of someone else

entirely: “reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away

from it on to the patient’s own ego.” According to Freud, the melancholic is

much angrier, and much more disappointed, by someone or something else

than she is with herself. Perhaps “a betrothed girl … has been jilted,”

perhaps she has been disillusioned by her mother, or by a poorly funded

school. But rather than letting go, she clings to the relationship as it was

through a curious mechanism. She identifies with her lost love, and even

takes on its worst attributes—the mother’s impossible standards, the

school’s expectation of criminality. Freud writes that “[her] narcissistic

identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic bond,

the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the

love-relation need not be given up…” The price she pays for hanging onto

her love is hanging on to her hate.

But depression is not only or always characterized by a repressed

identification that leads to self-hatred; it can also be caused by unrepressed

identifications that open out into an overwhelming empathy. I spent long

nights undone by documentaries about factory farming, days wild with rage

over the forced sterilizations of indigenous women. There is something

delusional in this empathy, to be sure: we do not all have equal claim to every

form of suffering. And yet, depression alerts you to an overlap between them,

the same way that Freud suggests that “there is no need to be greatly

surprised that a few genuine self-reproaches are scattered among those that

have been transposed back” from your lost love. There is genuine empathy

“scattered among” your empathetic fevers: empathy that lasts. In the

afterlife of my depression, the contours of my sense of human suffering have

permanently altered. I no longer have the reflexive disdain I once did for

people who don’t get out of bed. I can instantly recognize a certain dilation of

the pupils—what I privately think of as the “wormhole look.”

It is tempting to regard this enduring empathy as depression’s most crucial

lesson, and therefore as melancholy’s most precious charm. We like to

believe that suffering will make us wise because it softens us to the suffering

of others. Of course, we cannot escape the deadly evidence to the contrary:

the studies that warn that the hazed will haze, the abused will abuse. In her

recent book of essays The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison identifies the perils

of empathy even as aspiration. There’s the danger of appropriation, which I

alluded to above. “When bad things happened to other people, I imagined

them happening to me,” Jamison writes. “I [don’t] know if this was empathy

or theft.” But Jamison also has a sense of empathy’s “impossible

asymptote,” the skin that stays sticky between us. Appropriation is not only

a problem because you’ve claimed someone else’s feeling as your own; it is

also a problem because what you’ve claimed is probably—necessarily—not

their feeling. Jamison gets at something I’d like to believe about my own

depression: that it taught me something not only about empathy, but also

about empathy’s limits.

Friends who are in the trenches tell me how they feel: one is half-dead with

grief over the death of a distant cousin. Another cannot get out from under

the apocalypse of climate change. It turns my stomach to suspect—to know

—that they are, for lack of a better word, right. Suddenly I remember: just

because I don’t know someone well should not make him unmournable. This

is our only planet. Lars von Trier allegorizes the prescience of the

disastrously depressed in his 2011 movie Melancholia. Kirsten Dunst’s

character—a true basketcase—is the only one who can see that the earth will

soon be destroyed by an imminent collision with an unknown planet. Like my

friends, she’s right. But what haunts me is not her rightness. What haunts

me is the evocation of that other planet. Sometimes depression can work like

the devil’s tuning fork, pointing toward the poisoned river running beneath

the surface of our society. But depression also is that river, the sign that what

we cannot sense, source or solve—whether illness or sweetness, fact or

feeling—retains its own reality.

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