The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (review)

Modern depression is a relatively bland descendant of ancestors like accidie, spleen, black bile, tristimania, and melancholia. Melancholy, "a central cultural idea" through most of Western history, has fallen today to "an insignificant category, of little interest to medicine or psychology, and without explanatory or organizing vitality" (p. vii). In this valuable anthology, philosopher Jennifer Radden traces the history of an underappreciated idea, culling the works of thirty-one authors besides herself. "[D]ifferent and contrary meanings of melancholy and melancholia seem to accumulate and coexist, creating ambiguity and resonance as the centuries go by. Melancholy . . . is both a feeling and a way of behaving. It is a nebulous mood but also a set of self-accusing beliefs" (p. ix). With the advance of science and medicine, "melancholia and clinical depression begin to pull apart from the contradictory, multifaceted, amorphous, rich, and resonant melancholy of past times" (p. ix). Radden, who wrote Madness and Reason (1985) and Divided Minds and Successive Selves: Ethical Issues in Disorders of Identity and Personality (1996), provides a splendid fifty-page introductory overview. The selections, presented chronologically, emphasize the concept rather than the treatment of melancholy, and Radden has chosen to allocate more space to fewer authors, so that one piece often represents a whole tradition.

The pieces range in length from four to twenty-eight pages, the shortest including poets John Keats and Charles Baudelaire, the longest only Robert Burton. "Its misogyny aside, Burton's rambling, eclectic and ebullient Anatomy remains the most enduring and endearing among English works on melancholy" (p. 131). Burton called melancholia "a kind of dotage without any fever" (p. 130), accepting the characterization of the French physician André du Laurens (d. 1609), cited by Burton as "Laurentius" (pp. 130-31). Other authors allotted more than ten pages are Johann Weyer, Teresa of Avila, J. W. Goethe, Henry Maudsley, Emil Kraeplin, Sigmund Freud, and Melanie Klein.

Radden celebrates the recent interdisciplinary trend in historical scholarship. Many of her chosen authors defy conventional occupational/educational categories. Some are well known in medical history, others not. A summary view of the rest of this assemblage follows—and Redding provides a biographical introduction to each: Medicine: Galen, Ficino, Bright, Boerhaave, Pinel, Rush, Griesinger, Samuel Smiles, Beck, Goodwin, and Jean Baker Miller; Poetry: Anne Finch and Samuel Butler (of "Hudibras" fame); Religion: Cassian, Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila, and Cotton Mather; Philosophy: Aristotle and Kant; Psychology: Martin Seligman, Kay Redfield Jamison, and Julia Kristeva.

At such a generous feast, one hesitates to ask for more—yet because of Radden's deep scholarship and pellucid style, I wonder what she would say about Maimonides, Viktor Frankl, and William Styron. She provides a rich bibliography of some two hundred items, seventeen fine illustrations in the introduction, but a relatively sparse index of just three pages. A few typographical errors slipped by. The theme of the work resonates with Edward S. Reed's From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (1998); Reed makes much of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a key event in that history, and, with Redden's help, it, too, can be viewed under the mysterious light of melancholy.

While Burton's Melancholy (1621) enjoys continuing acclaim, his reliance on Timothie Bright comes as interesting news. Bright, whose Treatise on Melancholy (1586) was one of the first books on mental disorder from a medical perspective, was the only English author on melancholy cited by Burton. Bright's other interests eclipsed his investment in medicine:

He had developed a form of shorthand, a skill known to the ancient world but reinvented by Bright, and devoted much energy to ensuring its widespread adoption. In addition, he published a popular abridged version of the religious classic, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. By 1591, he...