Concept

Melancholia

Overview

Melancholia or melancholy (Ancient Greek: μελαγχολία, romanized: melancholía; from μέλαινα χολή, mélaina cholḗ, 'black bile') is a concept found throughout ancient, medieval, and premodern medicine in Europe that describes a condition characterized by markedly depressed mood, bodily complaints, and sometimes hallucinations and delusions. Besides a pathological condition, melancholy could also refer to a mood or temperament and at times it was even used as a description of the human condition in general.

Melancholy (or more precisely the 'black bile', from which melancholy derives its name) was regarded as one of the four temperaments matching the four humours. Until the 18th century, doctors and other scholars classified melancholic conditions as such by their perceived common cause – an excess of a notional fluid known as "black bile", which was commonly linked to the spleen. Hippocrates and other ancient physicians described melancholia as a distinct disease with mental and physical symptoms, including persistent fears and despondencies, poor appetite, abulia, sleeplessness, irritability, and agitation. Later, fixed delusions were added by Galen and other physicians to the list of symptoms. In the Middle Ages, the understanding of melancholia shifted to a religious perspective, with sadness seen as a vice and demonic possession, rather than somatic causes, as a potential cause of the disease.

During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a cultural and literary cult of melancholia emerged in England, linked to Neoplatonist and humanist Marsilio Ficino's transformation of melancholia from a sign of vice into a mark of genius. This fashionable melancholy became a prominent theme in literature, art, and music of the era.

Between the late 18th and late 19th centuries, melancholia was a common medical diagnosis. In this period, the focus was on the abnormal beliefs associated with the disorder, rather than depression and affective symptoms. In the 19th century, melancholia was considered to be rooted in subjective 'passions' that seemingly caused disordered mood (in contrast to modern biomedical explanations for mood disorders). In Victorian Britain, the notion of melancholia as a disease evolved as it became increasingly classifiable and diagnosable with a set list of symptoms that contributed to a biomedical model for understanding the mental disease. However, in the 20th century, the focus again shifted, and the term became used essentially as a synonym for depression. Indeed, modern concepts of depression as a mood disorder eventually arose from this historical context. Today, the term "melancholia" and "melancholic" are still used in medical diagnostic classification, such as in ICD-11 and DSM-5, to specify certain features that may be present in major depression. The 20th and 21st century accounts of depression are the successors of melancholia in psychiatry, but melancholia (or melancholy) also had a much wider use before the 19th century. It was a subject with which not only psychiatrists and doctors, but also philosophers, poets, artists, and writers all engaged. This led to a relatively ambiguous field of meaning, in which melancholy was accommodated within an understanding of human nature on the basis of humoral theory.

Related terms used in historical medicine include lugubriousness (from Latin lugere, 'to mourn'), moroseness (from Latin morosus, 'self-will or fastidious habit'), wistfulness (from a blend of wishful and the obsolete English wistly, meaning 'intently'), and saturnineness (from Latin Saturninus, 'of the planet Saturn').

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Melancholia is discussed.

The personal ego is now treated in the same manner as the abandoned object, and suffers all the aggression and expressions of revenge which were planned for the object. Even the suicidal tendencies of melancholia are more comprehensible when we consider that this bitterness of the patient falls alike on the ego itself and on the object of its love and hate. In melancholia as well as in other narcistic conditions a…
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
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Again, the imaginative power is called by this name--imagination--if the conjecturing (or surmising) power alone use it: and if the speaking (rational) power use it, it is called the thinking (cogitative) power. The heart is the source (spring) of all these powers (faculties), in Aristotle’s opinion; yet the sway over them is in different organs (instruments). Thus the sway over the outward (apparent) senses is in…
Avicenna, A Compendium on the Soul
states what it is; author linked in the graph
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They who are differently affected we must necessarily call "unsound." So that nothing is better than what is usual in Latin, to say that they who are run away with by their lust or anger have quitted the command over themselves; though anger includes lust, for anger is defined to be the lust of revenge. They, then, who are said not to be masters of themselves, are said to be so because they are not under the…
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth
states what it is; names the idea
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Lupe appears to be derived from the relaxation (luein) which the body feels when in sorrow; ania (trouble) is the hindrance of motion (alpha and ienai); algedon (distress), if I am not mistaken, is a foreign word, which is derived from aleinos (grievous); odune (grief) is called from the putting on (endusis) sorrow; in achthedon (vexation) “the word too labours,” as any one may see; chara (joy) is the very…
Plato, Cratylus
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We know that the fear of death makes its appearance under two conditions (which, moreover, are entirely analogous to the other situations in which anxiety develops), namely, as a reaction to an external danger and as an internal process, as for instance in melancholia. Once again a neurotic manifestation may help us to understand a normal one. The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the…
Sigmund Freud, The ego and the id
names the idea; opens on it
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Melancholia

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Melancholia

Related ideas

Place in the tradition