2. What is Melancholia?

I wanted to know what this illness is that made me so troubled Of course, no one can assure what is right or wrong Especially with this type of subject that is abstract, it is even harder to determine. Though it was interesting to see how Aristotle explained the mechanism of black bile inside human body to understand why melancholics behave in certain ways, and how Freud tried to explain melancholia by psychoanalysis Moreover, Kristeva’s innovative view on artwork as a result of therapeutic activity helped me see melancholia in a new way. To know and understand myself more, I had to face the illness directly So I started from the word itself From the very beginning, the word “melancholy” was a term that was used in Ancient Greek Medicine Etymologically, the word “melancholy” originated from the Acient Greek word melánkholos (μελάγχολος), which is a compound word of mélas(μέλας), meaning “black”, and khólos(χόλος), meaning “bile”.

Medieval woodcut showing the four humors, “Melang” shown on the bottom left

The Four Humors

To understand Aristotle’s discourse on melancholia, I should first explain about the theory of Hippocrates’. In 400 B.C., the Greek physician Hippocrates theorized The Four Humors insisting that the human body consits of four major fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. The Greeks believed that these Four Humours should remain balanced in order for people to maintain good health. A preponderance of black bile would cause a person to become despondent and anxious. They called this condition melancholia and it became the first term used for depression. Even though modern medical science has rejected the theories of the four temperaments, it is still very valuable to see how ancient people thought of melancholia. It is how they imagined the fluctuous hormonic reaction inside the body.

From Aristotle to Freud

In liberal arts, specifically in philosopy, it all started from the great Greek philosopher, Aristotle. In one of his writings called Problems II, Book XXX (there has been a controversy over its authenticity of whether it is an Aristotlian or pseudo-Aristotlian), he addresses a question about melancholia asking why all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry, or the arts are melancholic. He was the first man to associate melancholia to philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts. Since then, it had been a major topic in philosophy and aesthetics. Furthermore, Aristotle saw melancholia as a compound of two conflicting nature. He understood that melancholic humor is a mixture of hot and cold, and it itself is very variable. Black bile(melancholic humor) can be heated to high degree and turn cold as ice for a flash. Thus, melancholics are inevitably in erratic and fluctuant state due to their disposition. The heat inside one's body is the power that moves its mind and soul, and the hot air means some kind of erotic passion. Erotic passion here is not limited to the realm of sex but can also be interpreted as love. That passion stimulates senses and it operates imagination to its extreme. The temperature of black bile has direct effects to one's mind, creating a certain character, and there is great variety in the temperaments of melancholics. Some could be puzzled because they assumed that melancholics are always in depressive mood, but it is not true. Also in modern psychiatry, they say there are various types of depression. It varies in accordance of the duration of highs and lows in emotion. Perhaps this can be linked to why melancholics do not share identical experience but different case by case.

Sigmund Freud is an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis who analyzed melancholia pathologically through comparison with mourning. Mourning and Melancholia is a work of Freud which has influenced numerous philosophers such as Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, and so many others. According to his writing, mourning is a "reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on".2 In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; whereas, in melancholia, it is the ego itself. In melancholia, one cannot consciously percieve what they have lost, but in contrast, there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious when it comes to mourning. Here I could relate to my own experience of not knowing why I was crying sometimes. I was feeling depressive but I didn't know what was making me so. This is why mourning is considered a healthy and natural process that a person goes through when grieving a loss, while melancholia is considered pathological3. In addition, Freud believed that depression is highly affected by personal history, and he emphasized the role of grief resulting from the loss of an important relationship, triggering earlier memories of loss of, or rejection by, those first objects of love, the parents. Perhaps this explains why I was kept on having flashbacks of my childhood. Those include my mom's physical abuse, how my parents had reacted/dealt with my sexuality, and such.

Furthermore, Freud argued that the ultimate impetus of melancholia is an erotic desire, and the loss of capacity to love due to the loss of a loved object becomes an 'excessive attachment' towards the lost object and leads to melancholia through the identification process of the self and the lost object. Moreover, Freud points out self-reporaches and self-revilings, and excessive guilt as distinguisihing features of melancholia. He argues that “self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego” and that establish a relation of identification between the melancholic’s ego and the loved object. I had experienced two breakups in the Netherlands and both left me with questioning if I was the problem, or where I went wrong. There were moments when I blamed myself or my situation for those breakups, saying maybe I shouldn't have done this and that. Going over both Aristotle and Freud's theory on melancholia, I was able to reflect on my own experience and understand more about my melancholia. Still I have some questions left to be answered but at least it was worthy to find out what it was that I went through.

A Plea for New Perspective

As opposed to present-day perception of melancholia, there were times when it was praised and glorified in history. Aristotle was the first man stating in the 4th century B.C.E. that

all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease. 

During the Renaissance period, this belief had come to its revival and led John Milton to exclaim, in his poem Il Penseroso:

Hail, divinest melancholy / Whose saintly visage is too bright / To hit the sense of human sight. 

Albrecht Dürer - Melencolia I (1514)

However, by the 18th century, the term melancholia gained back its clinical roots and had been considered as madness or as a deadly sin in religious perspective for a long time. As you can see from the constant flips and reversals on perception of melancholia, it is not the first nor unconventional attempt to bring a change towards the way we perceive the condition. Melancholia may seem negative and in many aspects, it is indeed, but I wanted to say that it is not only negative but there actually are some potentials of melancholia. As a person who have experienced it, and still does from time to time, it sometimes makes you think, question, fight, and create. That is why I wanted to find if there had been some discussions regarding the relation between melancholia and creativity. Finding out how greek people in acient times had thought of melancholia was somehow comforting. Not that it says that I am special or anything but that I am not the only one who tried to make a link between melancholia and creativity. Nevertheless, I have found the right person who has suggested a great insight on melancholia; Julia Kristeva, and the right person who has proved it; Louise Bourgeois.

Julia Kristeva, born in 1941, is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, feminist and she explains melancholia as a source of creation to poets and artists. In her work Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes “the symbolic” as the realm in which a child becomes a “speaking subject,” and develops a sense of identity separate from the mother, distinguishing between self and other. This process of separation is called abjection, and in order to enter “the symbolic” — the world of language, meaning, culture, and the social which can also be associated with the masculine, the law, and structure —, the child must reject and move away from the mother. She argues that the perpetual desire for the lost mother, refusing to let go of that first maternal identification, can be a source of great artistic creativity. In her other work Black Sun (1989), she points out that especially female children continue to simultaneously reject and identify with the mother figure, and that they are more prone to retain a close connection to what she called “the semiotic” — it is similar to the concept of Lacan’s pre-mirror stage, and she refers to this phenomenon as melancholia. Furthermore, Kristeva associated aesthetic experience of the abject, such as art and literature, with poetic catharsis – an impure process that allows the artist or author to protect themselves from the abject only by immersing themselves within it.4 In other words, Kristeva contends that aesthetic elaboration through a work of art can be considered as a therapeutic method to alleviate the pain of melancholia. Thus, in her view, those creations of melancholic artists are the outcome of a therapeutic process to heal, and that is what Kristeva calls the melancholic “sublime.” 5

Before writing this thesis, I have known Louise Bourgeois only as an artist who made grotesque and sexual work, but during the research I happened to find more about her background stories and therefore I could have a better understanding of her work and could relate to her. Having known about her stories behind her work, she was the right person as a reference to my subject who can verify Kristeva’s theory.

Create to heal: Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois, a French-American artist, was born in 1911 in Paris and her family ran a business of repairing tapestries. She was very close to her mother Joséphine, but her father Louis, whom she was named after, was a person who gave her traumatic memories. Her mother went through an illness and for 10 years her father was having an affair with Louise’s English teacher, Sadie, who resided with her family. As much as she loved her mother, she loathed her father. Ironically, this horrible traumatic memory was what she got the most inspiration from. This marked the pivotal trauma that led her to create autobiographical artworks encompassing the subject of family, motherhood, relationships, abandonment, and the body.

Maman

Maman, a sculpture work that depicts a spider, would be the most well known work of Bourgeois. It is about, as you could possibly assume from the title, her mother. Spider resembles her mother in the sense that it weaves its web and that her mother made tapestries. It also depicts the strength of the mother with metaphors of nurture and protection. Spiders are known for its sacrificing maternity as they protect eggs at their best, and Bourgeois adopted the form of a spider to glorify the motherhood. The long and fragile legs of the spider reflect her mother being sick, but paradoxically it maximizes the awe of motherhood.

The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

— Louise Bourgeois 6

Maman (1999), Louise Bourgeois, Bronze, marble, and stainless steel, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, © Louise Bourgeois/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The destruction of the Father

The Destruction of the Father (1974), how dreadful and grave the title is, represents a family dinner table. It was inspired by her childhood fantasy in which she imagines avenging the paternal domination of the family at mealtimes. In this work, she dismembered her father, cannibalised him. It represents the reversed power strugle, depriving authority from her father. It seems like a punishment she gave to her father for betraying her mother and her family.

Time – time lived, time forgotten, time shared. What does time inflict – dust and disintegration? My reminiscences help me live in the present, and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you.

— Louise Bourgeois

Destruction of the father, Bourgeois, Louise. plaster, latex, wood, fabric, and red light, 1974. In Art Slant, by Shasha Bergstrom-Katz.

Bourgeois considered art in parallel to a form of psychoanalysis, offering privilleged and exclusive access to the unconciousness. By confronting and countless works of sublimation, Louise was able to heal. Her own work was a series of self-healing act to exorcise her trauma.

Similar to Louise, I have witnessed my father’s inappropriate message when I was 18 years old, and since then I have been holding resentments towards him for betraying my mother. According to Freud and Kristeva, it is a result of my identification to my mother. Adapting Kristeva’s theory to my own experience in the Netherlands, I partially interpreted the mother figure as my home country and understood my melancholia as the conflict of moving away from Korea, my motherland, to the Netherlands, “the symbolic.” As a woman, not just woman but asian woman living in the White-centered world, I was abjected. Living in a world where I become the minoirty — ignoring the fact that I was already the minority in Korea as a woman — in order to endure all those hardships, I had to depend on something, and that was Chrisitianity. Unfortunately, I was abjected again because of my sexuality. I have acknowledged that I was bisexual when I was 14 years old. Since then I have known about my sexuality, but at the Korean church where I fleed to, they told me I have to abandon my sexuality if I want to follow Jesus.

Just like a child growing up, moving away from their mother, I had to enter the new world of language, culture, and structure. In the way of the process, I have experienced conflicts and that also brought up my childhood memories that I happened to forget for a while. I have experienced several sexual harrassment when I was only six or seven years old from random people, and having to experience that again, and to be exposed to similar situations in a place where I am not familiar with brought that childhood memories again and kept lingering inside my brain. So many times I have been a victim of sexual harrasmant. This year I experienced another from my father’s friend two days before my birthday. That again pulled me down to a huge dump and took some days for me to come out. Sometimes I questioned myself if the problem was me, having to experience all those incidents. Here comes creativity to rescue. Changing the object to blame from myself to the perpetrators. Then I gain strengths to fight and it can be further turned into aesthetic elaboration to heal finally.

To sum up, the whole journey of writing this thesis has given me opportunities to understand myself more in various angles and new insight to deal with my mental illness. I was able to confront what I am going through and discover a way to overcome this darkness. What a complicated world of psychiatry. As I was greatly inspired by Julia Kristeva's theory on melancholia and creativity, I want to end this chapter by quoting Kristeva's interview:

As I say in my book, beauty is born in the land of melancholia; it is a source of harmony that goes beyond despair [...]. Depression is at the threshold of creativity. When depression becomes creative, however, it has given a name and has thus been overcome [...]. Depression remains a secret force, perhaps even a form of modern sacredness.”7

3. Three People, Three Melancholia

Melancholia appears differently in every individual. Since the factors that make people depressive differ, it is natural and logical that the outcomes are different. I have talked to three different people who have told me that they have experienced melancholia or depression and shared how they think about melancholia and the link between melancholia and creativity. They are from different fields of profession, so it was interesting to compare. I will deploy in order of the date of our conversation.

1  A (Anonymous), 27, Artist, 3.12.2020

E(Eunji Lee): How do you recall your melancholia?

A: First of all, when I think about the period when I was depressed, I was in a state that I could do nothing. That time it was so severe that when I woke up in the morning, even washing my face felt like a huge task, and I remember I couldn't attend school normally. So, I went to Korea to get treated. I went through hospital treatment and very luckily I could find the right medicine for me. In a month, I got a lot better and could go back to school eventually.

E: Do you find melancholia only negative or is there any aspect you thought as positive effect?

A: Looking back, the negative influence was tremendous, and just as physical pain, depression is also something that should have treatment. But I think it is not that there was no positive influence of depression. Though it wasn't during depression that I see positive effect, but after getting cured, I became thankful to every little thing I experience in my daily life. I could do things that I couldn't do when I was in depression and I became more sensitive towards them. My depression was so severe that I thought too much about suicide and I had to be hospitalized. Maybe because of that I find the shift more dramatic.

E: What has affected your depression? What do you see as the factor?

A: When I think about the cause of my depression, I think the start was my parenting environment. Growing up, I have experienced emotional violence from my mother. It was when I was in highschool that I have noticed my depression and it got worse after I came to the Netherlands. I was already not in good terms with my mother, and one day my dad called to tell me that my mom attempted suicide and that she was at the hospital. I was extremely mad when I heard that. Not that I was worried but extremely mad. I think that was the momentum of my depression. Not so many days later, I had reached to a point that I could no longer handle myself, so I went back to Korea and got treated.

E: I see that you were influenced by your mother a lot. How was the relationship like?

A: Our relationship was really bad. Growing up, I knew I was abused emotionally but my mother didn't understand that. Due to my memory of my childhood, I think I blamed my mother a lot. The main emotion I felt was anger. I don't know if you've watched the movie We Need to Talk about Kevin 8 but the relationship of Kevin and his mother in the movie was similar to mine. Now I came to think that it was only that my mother was not familiar and inexperienced with expression, but between us, the way of expression was so wrong and twisted. I think it all happened due to lack of love and understanding. Now we are in good terms. My mother and I took medicinal and psychiatric treatment. You know when a person is depressed, everything gets distorted and it is not easy to see things relaxed. But since we both became emotionally stable, it went easier to communicate and in a more mature manner we understood situations. Therefore we didn't fight or argue anymore.

E: I see that you were influenced by your mother a lot. How was the relationship like?

A: Our relationship was really bad. Growing up, I knew I was abused emotionally but my mother didn't understand that. Due to my memory of my childhood, I think I blamed my mother a lot. The main emotion I felt was anger. I don't know if you've watched the movie We Need to Talk about Kevin 8 but the relationship of Kevin and his mother in the movie was similar to mine. Now I came to think that it was only that my mother was not familiar and inexperienced with expression, but between us, the way of expression was so wrong and twisted. I think it all happened due to lack of love and understanding. Now we are in good terms. My mother and I took medicinal and psychiatric treatment. You know when a person is depressed, everything gets distorted and it is not easy to see things relaxed. But since we both became emotionally stable, it went easier to communicate and in a more mature manner we understood situations. Therefore we didn't fight or argue anymore.

E: Do you find your relationship with your mother as the only thing that affected your depression?

A: I do think that was the core and the start but not the only problem. Since I was in deficiency both emotionally and mentally, I tried to indulge it from other places. For me it was work. Therefore, I was too obsessed with making works and when it didn't go well, it made me even more anxious. I think because of the lack of love and attention I felt from my mother, I wanted other people's recognition through my work to replace it. That again made me depressed.

E: Do you think medicine is the best remedy?

A: I don't think it is the only way to treat depression. It is undeniable that the medicine is very much important but I had consultation at the same time so I guess the medicine worked as an extinguisher.

2  B (Anonymous), 26, Elementary Teacher, 5.12.2020

E: Since when do you think your depresssion appeared?

B: You may know as well, it's difficult to recognize it if you're going through depression. But I assume it might be the time when I was in the states. You know there was a guy I had a crush on. He had a melancholic habitus, and he had some family history. I liked him a lot so I wanted to help him. I even wanted to take his burden if it was possible. I think that was my mistake. His melancholic mood was contagious, and I think that was the beginning that caused the change of my dispostion.

E: Were you able to find any positive effect of melancholia?

B: Later I went back to the states again to learn English for a year, and living alone, I had plenty of time to think. In a place where I was not comfortable with the language, I had thought about my identity a lot and looked back on my life at a distance. The change of environment and having nowhere/nobody to depend on while living alone made me feel depressive. During that period, I had realized that to everything there is an end and that made me nihilistic. I thought life was meaningless, but on the other side, that taught me to appreciate and feel grateful for each and every day. Life goes on, time passes anyway. Life is meaningless but therefore we need to value this moment and spend it meaningfully.

E: How was that possible? How could you turn that negative thinking into a positive thinking?

A: Well, back then it was all negative. But when looking back even before when I wasn't depressive, I think I didn't know myself that much. It made me think about things that I put off by way of excuse that I had other things to do, like tasks and assignments. Thoroughly about myself, I didn't know what I like, what makes me happy, this kind of things I hadn't thought about deeply before. So that is the positive side of melancholia that I have experienced.

3  Suho Lee, 28, Junior Architect, 6.12.2020

E: What is your impression on melancholia in general? What were the factors to your depression?

S(Suho): My impression on melancholia is that I feel so inadequate. It is like water right before starting to boil and it shatters away. You don't see movement so the outside seems serene, but inside exists this anxiety which you have no clue when it will burst. You can't do anything. When I think about what made me depressive, it was the fear of living as "myself" and self-hatred.

E: It is with no doubt that melancholia has negative influence for the most part but have you experienced any positive aspects?

S: Personally, I think it's almost impossible to find positive sides of depression when you're going through it. But when you try to come out of it, I believe there is some positive sides. Regarding my experience, while striving to come out of depression to live everyday healthily, I have started to learn about new feelings that I didn't know before. It was like drawing with color pencils on a sheet of black paper. There were some moments when, from cooking, doing laundries, cleaning, these little everyday routine, I started to realize how precious these feelings that I had forgotten or never had known even are.

E: Do you see any potential relations between melancholia and creativity?

S: I think it depends on how you see the meaning of creativity but in respect of finding unfamiliar feelings and emotions, it might be posible to find correlation between the two. Plus, as there is a saying that "There are one reason for happiness but hundreds for misery.", it seems like melancholia appears in so many different faces, and that creates lots of stories.

E: What do you think is the most important thing to overcome depression?

S: To love people.

To summarize the three interviews above, I came to a conclusion that melancholia does not generate creativity itself. It is such a painful state that it is almost imposible to do anything. In fact, creativity seems to take an important role when trying to overcome the condition. Creativity does not only mean the ability to make something physical but it can also mean the ability to bring up change in ways of thinking. It is crucial to shift the way of thinking when overcoming melancholia. Creativity makes you see things in a different way and that brings you joy from what you used to think as nothing and trivial. In the prologue, I mentioned that I had built a wall between me and others when I felt that we were different and that my feelings and despair could not be shared. During that period, I was focusing on how much different I was from others and that was gnawing my inner soul bit by bit. It was not only them who were bullying me but also I was aggravating the pain myself. In fact, the next year, I felt the neccessity to change the way I see this issue because I thought I should stop torturing myself. To overcome that feeling of alienation, I made a work about race, suggesting that we should embrace the fact that we are different and learn from each other. It seems like I was asking others to see things differently but actually it was me who I was talking to, and asking for a change. For this thesis as well, I felt a lot of times that It was actually me the one that wanted to change and heal from the past, the pain, and the illness. There were moments that I wanted to avoid confronting, and ran away, but then I talked to myself that I have to do this in order to move on and that I knew I can do this. I was in extreme darkness at some point, feeling so insecure and the stress was putting me into the dump again. Again there I saw a lighting dot, telling me that I was only scared of something that doesn't even exist. That is what I call creativity. It seems trivial but it was my guardian. It was a power that guided me through a tunnel of darkness. Thus, confirming Kristeva's theory, creativity was dragging me out of the darkness.