Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia

Kristeva's is definitely worth a read. While staking a claim for the salubrious effects of psychoanalysis, the author freshly details art's engagement with melancholy and depression. The first chapter or two will make rough going for the reader who is not amused by the lexicon of psychoanalysis. But even readers with a literary intolerance of that sort will find the third chapter on feminine depression sensitively written and thoughtfully invested with human presence. The chapters on art and artists with melancholia make generally excellent reading. The most brief of the chapters, "Beauty: The Depressive Other's Realm," provides a soaring inauguration of the author's poetic and psychoanalytic approaches to the madness and melancholia among Durer, Nerval, Dostoevsky, and Duras. The chapter on Duras might not bear a discussion of an author familiar to American readers but it is worth reading because it alone of the chapters explicity raises questions concerning politics, expectations, madness and depression. The author investigates the sites she has chosen with great sensitivity and radiant intellect. Scattered clouds will be apparent to those who find psychoanalysis an unsatisfying or capricious methodology of investigation.

This is a different approach to depression. Too often, our focus has been on the DSM-IV approach, or to the treatment of depression using selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac and Paxil. Very rarely does somebody, let alone a respected psychoanalyst, attempt to explain what it actually *feels* like to experience major depression. This is a writing that gives meaning to depression, and I feel that it helps people and their families understand the experience of depression.The process of all modalities of psychotherapy involves communication, a dialogue between the therapist and the client. This process draws the client out and is an essential factor in the care of the client. Kristeva emphasizes the "antidepressant qualities of psychoanalysis." While acknowledging the utility of antidepressants in psychotherapy, the function of the linguistic component seeks to emphasize the meaning of the "inconsolable loss" experienced by the depressed patient. To symbolically illustrate the sensation of depression, Kristeva uses great sensativity in drawing on the poetry of Gerard de Nerval, the novels of Doestoyevsky, and Hans Holbein's picture "Dead Christ.""Dark Sun" had meaning to me because of its emphasis on the *individual* and how he or she feels. We must always emphasize the dignity of the individual in dealing with the depressed.

In much the same way that Philippe Aries took the subject of childhood and illuminated it for all time in "Centuries of Childhood," fellow French writer (although Bulgarian-born) and Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva examines depression and melancholia. She comes at it from various angles and filters: fine arts, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and of course psychology. She posits psychoanalysis as a (really THE) 'counterdepressant' -- convincingly. This is great highbrow stuff: chapters with titles like"Beauty, the Depressive's Other Realm," and "Life and Death of Speech." Death, suicide, the inevitable gloom resulting from loss of maternal, later erotic, love; all are insightfully discussed -- even rather tenderly. If you're depressed BLACK SUN won't make you more so -- and if you're feeling okay to begin with, it's a terrific scholarly study.