Julia Kristeva approaches melancholia starting from Freud’s basic intuitions but she places it within a conceptual framework that pays lip service to semiotics and Lacan. In that sense she argues that one of the most distinctive characteristics of the melancholic is that he or she cannot find the words for loss. Meanwhile, the lost object belongs as such entirely to the ego. This is caused by the unnameable Thing, according to Kristeva, which comes as a result of the trauma of the pre-symbolic confrontation with the mother-figure. Kristeva illustrates her proposition with an analysis of Holbein’s work The Dead Christ. The aspect of a dead past continues to haunt throughout several degrees of depression and melancholy. In this way her position closely lines up with Freud’s concept of narcissistic neurosis as Freud extended this concept to psychosis. As a consequence, Kristeva’s position leads to a paradox: on the one hand she claims that melancholia is a particular aspect of psychopathology, whilst on the other, she attempts to grasp melancholia in a transnosographic way.
Search
Latest articles
- “I don’t stop; I start again.” The position of the analyst in ‘long term care’By Glenn Strubbe
- Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-sièc…By Hub Zwart
- Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problemBy Evi Verbeke
- The Violence of Right: Rereading ‘Why War?’By Jens De Vleminck
Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Child analysis
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Identity
Institution
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Real
Repetition
Repression
Sade
Signifier
Subject
Sublimation
the Gaze
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
Writing