The Socio-Political Dimension of Hysteria and Melancholia—Between Revolution and Stagnation

Abstract

This paper explores the psychoanalytic distinction between hysteria and melancholia as mechanisms of trauma processing and their implications for socio-political dynamics. Through an examination of Freud and Klein, with reference to Lacan, Deleuze and Sartre, this study proposes a regression-oscillation hypothesis, arguing that subjects move in a fluid manner between hysterical externalization (conversion, reactionary symptoms, public outcry) and melancholic internalization (introjection, self-reproach, political stagnation). By engaging with Freud's case of Dora the article demonstrates how identification patterns shape the structure of symptom formation, suggesting that hysteria and melancholia function as pre-structured modes of engagement with loss and crisis. Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis provides a framework for understanding these responses as tracings rather than mappings (seemingly dynamic yet ultimately repeating pre-scripted trajectories). This perspective is then applied to collective historical and political movements more broadly, examining how cycles of revolutionary upheaval and melancholic resignation often fail to produce genuine transformation, instead producing the very structures they seek to dismantle. Ultimately, the discussion raises a fundamental question: to what extent are both individual and collective responses to “trauma” governed by a pre-ordained script, and what possibilities remain unarticulated—not because they are repressed, but because they have been erased before they could even be conceptualized?