Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia by Julia Kristeva

Abstract

Depression (in all its forms, from neurotic depression to melancholia) is as mysterious as it is widespread and everyday. Why do depressives continually intoxicate themselves with bottomless, incommunicable sorrow? Physicians assure us that depression is primarily a physiolog­ ical disorder. Psychoanalysis finds the sources of depression tucked away in the niches of our memories, conscious and unconscious. In a curiously nonpolemical argument which looks to medicine as well as psychoanalysis for answers and refuses to see these two discourses as exclusive and diametrically opposed, Kristeva elaborates in Black Sun a theory of depression which builds upon and departs from the insights of Freud. Although she recommends the use of chemical anti-depressants to a point at which psychotherapeutic work becomes possible, Kristeva sees depression not as an illness to be corrected with drugs, but as a discourse to be listened to and analyzed. This perspective on depression is, of course, Freudian. The psycho­ analytic theory of Freud and Melanie Klein concludes that depression conceals a hatred toward a lost love object, usually the mother of infancy. Through the mechanism of identification, the depressive’s aggression is directed away from the object and inward on the self, resulting in self-hatred and cannibalistic fantasies of a cut up but regained lost object. The treatment of depression, according to Freud, requires a bringing to consciousness that the devalorization of oneself is actually an unconscious hatred of the other. With this recognition there must also be a naming of the sexual desire which underpins that hatred. Freudian psychoanalysis is central to Black Sun. Nevertheless, Kristeva’s work moves her beyond this initial psychoanalytic under­ standing of depression as the concealed hatred of a lost love object.