Lyn Cowan - Portrait of The Blue Lady

Portrait оf the
Blue Lady
The Character
of
Melancholy
Lyn Cowan
PORTRAIT OF
THE BLUE LADY
PORTRAIT OF
THE BLUE LADY
The Character ofMelancholy
Lyn Cowan
Spring Journal Books

New Orleans, Louisiana
Electra Series 3
© 2004 by Lyn Cowan.

All rights reserved.
Published by
Spring Journal, Inc.;
627 Ursulines Street;
New Orleans, Louisiana 70116
Printed in Canada.
Text printed on acidfree paper.
Cover design by
Northern Cartographic
4050 Williston Road
South Burlington, VT 05403
Library in Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Pending
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following persons and publishers for
permission to reproduce or quote from this material:
Reproduction of Albrecht Durer’s engraving, Melencolia I: Bequest of

William P. Chapman, Jr., Class of 1895. Courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson
Museum of Art, Cornell University.
Quotations from The Discovery ofthe Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger,
copyright © 1970 by Henri F. Ellenberger. Used by permission of Basic Books,
Inc., publisher.
Excerpt from Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries, copyright
© 1955 University of Indiana Press, Bloomington, Indiana. Used by permission
of the publisher.
Quotation from Shame and Necessity by Bernard Williams, copyright © 1993
Regents of the State of California, University of California Press. Used by permission
of the publisher.
Quotation from The Art ofMemory by Frances A. Yates, copyright © by
Frances A. Yates, Unviersity of Chicago Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
Quotation from Equus by Peter Shaffer, copyright © 1973 by Peter Shaffer,
Penguin Books, 1977. Reproduced by permission of Penguine Books Ltd.
Quotation from Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman, copyright © 1989
by Eva Hoffman. Used by Permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group
(USA) Inc.
“The Angel Poem” by Gerald Stern first appeared in The Red Coal, published
in 1981 by Houghton Mifflin. Used by permission of Gerald Stern.
Quotation from Pat Berrys essay, “Image in Motion,” in Jung and Film: Post-
Jungian Takes on the Moving Image edited by Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister,
copyright © by Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister. Used by permission of the publisher,
Brunner-Routledge, 2001.
Quotation from Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman, copyright ©1975
by James Hillman, Harper & Row, Publishers, used by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers, Inc.
In memory ofRubin,
andfor all the loves lost
Contents
Acknowledgments............................................................................ ix
INTRODUCTION
“A Melancholy of Mine Own ...”......................... 1
PART I: THE BLUE LADY

Chapter 1: Meeting the Blue Lady............................................ 15
PART II: DAME MELANCHOLY’S TALES

Chapter 2: Dame Melancholy’s Family.................................... 29
Chapter 3: Metamorphosis of the Blue Lady
(or, How the Lady Became a Tramp)..................... 43
Chapter 4: Hard Times for Melancholy................................... 61
Chapter 5: Old Theory for a New Age: The Humors
(Embellished by the Author).................................. 73
Chapter 6: A Problem of Air..................................................... 93
Chapter 7: On the Tyranny of Balance................................... 103
Chapter 8: Greatness, Passion, Madness ................................. 115
Chapter 9: Barren Windows: Acedie........................................ 127
Chapter 10: Pessimism and Religious Melancholy................... 155
Chapter 11: Memory and Nostalgia........................................... 171
Chapter 12: Shame and Guilt..................................................... 185
PART III: ROBERT BURTON’S DIAGNOSTICKES
Chapter 13: Robert Burton and HisDetails.............................. 215
PART IV: PASSING THROUGH SATURN’S RINGS

Chapter 14: Coming Almost Full Circle................................... 253
CODA (Blues style)....................................................................... 279
Notes................................................................................................ 281
Index................................................................................................ 293
viii
Acknowledgments
It would take more paper than several dozen trees could provide to
thank and recognize the friends, colleagues, and critics who helped this book
find its way from a corner of my mind into the world. So I mention here
only a few names, and hope all the others who have made this book happen
in one way or another will know who they are and accept my gratitude, which
runs deep.
Very special thanks go to Bonnie Fisher, stalwart friend and best critic;
Jan Bauer, who never gives up on me; Margie, who said the one thing necessary
for me to finish; and my great companions: Duncan Patch the Smart Jock,
Willie Jim the Heartful Mystic, Dickinson the Sweet Poet, Callie the Beautiful
Incorrigible, and of course Rubin, Prince of Melancholy and of the wonderful
little world we had with him.
ix
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever ...
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes, 1: 4, 8-9
Good morning heartache

you old lonely sight
thought we said goodbye last night
I’ve turned and tossed until it seems you have gone

But here you are with the dawn ...
What’s new?
—“Good Morning Heartache,”

sung by Billie Holiday
INTRODUCTION
“A Melancholy of Mine Own ...”
I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is

emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical;
nor the courtier’s which is proud; nor the soldier’s,
which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic;
nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s which is
all these. But it is a melancholy of mine own,
compounded of many simples, extracted from many
objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my
travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a
most humourous sadness.
—Jacques, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It

here is an old saying: “One must needs scratch where it itches.” As it
T is for others who share a melancholic temperament with me, the itch
of melancholy is always there, calling attention to itself, wanting the
surface scratched to get to something deeper, wanting to be understood, to
find some point to it all. But as any flea-bitten dog can tell you, the scratching
relieves the itch only briefly, and then the fleas come back.
So this book is not a “cure” for melancholy: not a “treatment” for
melancholy but of it. There are qualities and characteristics of melancholy
that have social and individual redeeming value, and these qualities will
receive the attention here they are denied elsewhere in our present world.
The denial of these aspects of melancholy has added to the natural irritability
and tendency to sarcasm that seems to belong to this temperament, and so
the style of this book reflects my own restlessness and impatience with those
who regard this most ancient affliction more as a curse than as the
extraordinary gift it may be. They see the fleas, I am looking at the dog.
Though not always pleasant and sometimes downright miserable, my
melancholy still has served me well: it has forced a realistic outlook, a
relentless pursuit of meaning in the chaos that passes for life, and it has served
as a goad to escape the comforting but often tiresome glibness of
contemporary American culture. I am less dissatisfied with the quality of
my melancholy than I am with most of what is being done with and said
about it. And I am hardly alone: any person of melancholic temperament
who is forced to live in the thin sunlight of spurious optimism, who is told
not to scratch the maddening itch (for which no effective flea powder has
yet been invented), is kindred to me in spirit.
I have never understood why or how some people manage to persist
in their optimism. What fraudulent hope fuels this sort of naivety? One has
to be completely ignorant of history—any history, anyone’s history—and be
intellectually younger than eight years old in order to be chronically optimistic,
3
PORTRAIT OF THE BLUE LADY
and even most eight-year-olds know something of pain, hardship, betrayal,

and how precarious is the trust placed in adults.
My primary “field of research” has been the weed-and-flower patch of
experience. Robert Burton, the seventeenth-century cleric and melancholic
scholar with whom we will visit many times in this book, has been my
example in this approach: “That which others hear or read of, I felt and
practiced myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by
melancholizing.”1 “Melancholizing” is, to my mind, the art of being
unresistant to the melancholic state and perceiving one’s experience from
within it. It means wearing blue-tinted glasses, to see in a dimmed light, to
notice how life is in the darker moods. It means understanding the
melancholic mood as a mood that cultivates memory, deep thought, allows
for insight, provides solid grounding, and encompasses what is best described
as a religious attitude that brings a sense of significance to even the small
events and experiences of life. It is also a difficult and painful psychological
condition that moves one—unwillingly, but sometimes with a sense
of necessity—to the center of the most intolerable emotions:
unbearable loneliness, tormenting lovelessness, inconsolable grief, and
stark, red-eyed despair.
“Melancholizing” also partly means “personifying,” as James Hillman
has elaborated in Re-Visioning Psychology.2 “Dame Melancholy,” portrayed
in various forms through several centuries, is best personified in Diirer’s
engraving (Plate I). I have taken this image of her as Muse, and in the first
part of this book she will speak in her own voice as I imagine she might.
Like the figure in Diirer’s engraving, I too have a tendency to sit, staring
intensely, or glaring, not so much still as coiled. She seems to me to express
imminent movement in a state of suspended activity, which I experience as
restlessness. The more deeply I feel myself into what she evokes, the more
Muse-like she becomes, the more melancholic I become, and I perceive her
then as a woman of contained power, a divine Muse.
I have tried to let the spirit of Dame Melancholy, the Blue Lady, infuse
this book. As shown by Diirer in this particular portrayal, she is clearly no
shrunken hag, rotten with the old medieval sin of acedie, spiritual despair,
laziness, sloth. She is a majestic personage, pregnant with possibility, cramped
4
INTRODUCTION
for space to soar on powerful wings of imagination. Perhaps better than any
other image, she embodies the paradox, frustration, and capacity for insight
that characterizes the melancholic temperament: fierce introspection, a
passionate preoccupation with the past, the ability to see far and deeply
within, the constraints of too much thought that never, or only with painful
slowness, seems to move forward into action.
This book is intended to be an unfolding of two primary themes:
melancholy as a natural, homeopathic, at least partial antidote to the mania
of modern western culture; and melancholy as a distinct psychological state
that can be a matrix of creative work: the Lady Melancholy as Muse.
In our day, Dame Melancholy has become less than a shadow of her
former majestic self. She has been reduced to “depression,” depersonified
into a “major Depressive Disorder,” as it is called in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual, the primary manual used by psychiatrists and clinical
psychologists in the United States. And even then, she is included only as a
“qualifier,” an add-on feature making things even worse than just
“depressed.” The qualities that distinguish melancholy—its bittersweetness,
its nostalgia, its sad romanticism, its existential pessimism—all have been
subsumed and undifferentiated in the diagnostic category of “depression.” And
because these qualities conflict with basic western, and especially American,
ideals of health and progress, the dark visage of Dame Melancholy in the
modern psyche is conceived as a symptom of sickness instead of perceived as
the womanly face of wisdom and slow care.
Medicine is the dominant paradigm in which melancholy, now called
“depression,” is examined and treated. Extracting psychological phenomena
we don’t like or that we imagine as “failed” seems analogous to surgically
removing fat through liposuction, eliminating skin wrinkles, rebuilding noses
of various dissatisfying shapes. In psychology the move is to remove
depression, extract rage, medicate violence. The medical model has tyrannized
psyche, while psychologists too often have become accomplices in the
destruction of their profession. Joining their psychiatric cousins in a
medicalized view of and approach to depression, psychologists complain
(mainly about their second-place status) and comply at the same time. There
will be more than one occasion in this book to consider how a too one-sided
5
medical view of psychological melancholy has inhibited rather than contributed

to our understanding of it.
Robert Burton: A Kindred Spirit
ince Robert Burton (1577-1640) and his work play a starring role in this
S book, a brief background of him is in order here. He was most

knowledgeable about melancholy’s anatomical details, and we can learn much
from him. In 1621, Burton, an Anglican clergyman, published The Anatomy
ofMelancholy: What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes
and severall cures ofit. By 1640, the year of Burton’s death at the age of 63,
the book had gone through five editions. A scholarly librarian at Oxford and
a contemporary of Shakespeare, Burton had a reputation for being unpedantic
in spite of his learning and intense nature. Nor does he seem to have been
the subject of much gossip, which perhaps reflects well on his moral character.
In a 1932 preface to a contemporary edition of The Anatomy, Holbrook
Jackson remarks upon the irony that a book on melancholy should become
one of the great “entertainments” in English literature. I am sure Burton
would appreciate the irony, but I also suspect that the melancholic in him
would be bitter and saddened that his lifelong affliction, for and through
which he had labored in his own context, had become a sort of entertainment.
Worse, he would be appalled to find the medical profession treating his
melancholia, not as an affliction of his soul, but as a disease now called by a
much less musical name, “depression,” a mere physiological anomaly of too
little norepinephrine in his brain. One thousand-plus pages of his passionate
opus reduced to a secretion and a pill.
Burton’s work is important because it is a complete “anatomy” of
melancholy, a thorough taking apart and examining of a complicated
subjective condition. There is much wisdom (and much folly, and much bile,
and much attacking of fools) in Burton’s book, and we ought not to discard
his discoveries simply because he’s been dead for three and a half centuries.
We melancholics need all the help we can get. Though Burton and I, for
example, are removed from each other by four centuries, gender, religion,
place of national origin, and dozens of other personal peculiarities, we have
in common a saturnine temperament, and in our mutual estimation of this
6
INTRODUCTION
affliction (if not our conclusions about it), we are kindred spirits and
intellectual comrades.
I particularly like Burton because he is not a doctor and does not share
the prejudices of a medical model concerning his melancholy. In our world,
most of us—doctors or not—look to medicine to fix what ails us, the cheaper
the better, and sooner best of all. Few of us who get depressed are willing to
“put up” with feeling lousy, and don’t see why we should. It is a small step
from this attitude to collusion with the medical view that depression is, really,
nothing more than physiology gone awry, a chemical imbalance: a matter
of adjusting the serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain. All it should
take is the equivalent of a front-end lobe alignment with Prozac, or Zoloft,
or whatever is the latest anti-depressant on the market. The premise is that
if there is a somatic “cause” that can be “blamed” for your depression, there
is no psychological reason for you to feel like a miserable wretch; it is
ephemeral, without meaning, signifying nothing. The primacy of the physical
makes all else secondary, or less. We are materialists in more insidious ways
than we know.
he direction of melancholy is not only down (and out, in the dumps, to
T the pits), it is also back to the past, to history. The backward movement
of psychic energy or attention is called “regression” (literally, to move back).
Psychoanalysis has given regression a bad name by associating it with a retreat
to a “less adapted” level of psychological development, with connotations of
infantilism, neediness, and dependency. Since our culture has a mania for
progress, the very idea of regress is distasteful and is usually associated with
clinical depression. The forward upward movement of “progress” (often
confused with “civilization”), which is also the direction spirituality usually
takes, has forced naturally regressive movements of the soul into the shadow,
into disrepute, into pathology.
There was a time when “depression,” before it was called that, had some
value, some purpose. There is a continuous tradition from antiquity
recognizing that melancholia is an affliction given by the gods, and
particularly an affliction accompanying greatness. Though melancholics are
7
known to be solitary in their sorrow, we find a historical community in the

western world of like-minded souls, stretching back at least to Artistotle, who
was a self-declared melancholic and wrote a treatise on the subject.
Although the content and context ofour sorrows and melancholic mournings
are different from age to age and person to person, the nature of this sorrow itself
is amazingly similar: the quality of grief, the preoccupation with philosophic
questions of distressing import (the meaning of life, despair, suicide), and the
peculiar specific traits of the melancholic temperament. These traits include, but
are not limited to: an enormous capacity for work coupled with a frustrating lack
of motivation, flashes of intellectual brilliance, temper tantrums, sullen fits, and
an exceptional talent for leadership. And with these traits one often finds a variety
of physical disturbances in the melancholic person, including various degrees of
insomnia, bad digestion, and constipation.
Melancholy has long been recognized as a scourge that brings its gifts
to those souls who are called to become poets, artists, philosophers, scholars,
mystics, psychologists, architects, and statesmen/women. The affliction also
strikes heavily those called to any of these vocations, who, owing to
circumstances and accidents of place of birth, color, class, or gender, cannot
live out their calling.
While these fields of study (art, literature, philosophy, religion, politics)
are not identical with each other, they all share an affinity of spirit:
melancholy is an affliction of the humanities. In this tradition, beginning
in ancient Greece and still extant in the heart of every romantic, it is expected
that melancholy accompanies great achievements in these fields, and in some
sense is a necessary precondition for them. The list is long of those so
accursedly gifted: Beethoven, Churchill, Lincoln, Michelangelo, Billie
Holiday, Virginia Woolf, the prophet Jeremiah, Martin Luther, Eleanor
Roosevelt, William James, Alice James (William’s sister), Toulouse-Lautrec,
Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Mary Ann
Evans), George Sand (Aurore Dupin), on and on. Most of what we call
culture is made by melancholics.
Eight years before his death, the German poet Goethe wrote in 1824:
I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at

bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can
8
INTRODUCTION
affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four
weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a
rock that must be raised up again and again forever.3
Goethe here touches all our themes: the chronicity of melancholia,

lasting a lifetime; the heaviness and weight of melancholia, its rocklike
density; a kind of repetition of psychic life that requires one to keep raising
the same rock, returning to bedrock, the same stone-etched patterns of
pathologies and longings of one’s soul, forever. Here is the power of
melancholia to render so much of one’s experience apparently ungenuine,
inauthentic, doubtful—so that well-being can barely be imagined as
something genuine, let alone natural. And here too is the melancholic’s
conviction that at bottom, at the very deepest ground of one’s being, there
is only pain and burden, always has been and always will be, all is vanity
and there is nothing new under the sun. And yet with and for all that pain
and burden, there can be an acceptance of that as a reality—even an embrace
of it—as a matter of Fate decreed for one’s existence, the course, not curse,
of one’s being. Such an acceptance implies that to say anything against such
a bestowal from the gods is a denial of one’s deepest being, one’s necessity,
one’s fate; a blasphemy. Not to speak against this affliction is somehow to
affirm one’s soul.
n this writing I am not much concerned with “justifications” and “proofs,”
I preferring rather to follow the old practical adage that if the shoe fits, wear
it. A book such as this—polemical and passionate, not interested in fairness
or objectivity—does not need “scientific studies” and “empirical evidence”
to validate its contents. My intent is to portray my subject, not to prove
anything in particular about it. With Jane Austen’s character in Persuasion,
“I will not allow books to prove anything.” Validation, if necessary, may be
gained by watching two hours of prime-time network television, reading a
few newspapers for one week, or noticing what pulls you into a sad reverie
or malaise. Rather than a thorough, erudite work like Burton’s, or a scientific
medical treatise, I articulate a vision, however fragmented and partial, of a
reality, however incomplete. With Brother Burton, I will have irascible
9
comment aplenty about things which seem to have only a tenuous relationship
with melancholy: the decline of a sense of character, the abysmal state of
education, the paucity of psychological thought, the near-illiteracy of too many
politicians, professional sell-outs of all sorts, to name a few. But a melancholic
sensibility is deepened by and sharpens itself in contention with what is going
on in the world.
And while I feel, with Burton, the need to “scratch where it itches,” I
am not so adamant as he to find a “cure.” I have a melancholy worry that if
I am cured, I will no longer write, because my Muse will have left me. If
there is no itch—no discomfort, no confusion, no compelling need to
understand—then there is no need to scratch. Once the condition dissolves,
the Blue Lady disappears. Who then will lead me to my own depths? Who
will ask impossible questions from within? Who will visit with the gift of
desire to write? If I am “cured,” the psychic “person” leaves with the
condition, and I am less than I was.
Will anything in this book be useful to you, Reader, or helpful, or
insightful, or merely entertaining? If so, then we have both gained something.
I am more interested in effect than cause, and still more interested in
descriptions, textures, patterns, meanings, and those odd elements that come
together to make a melancholy of one’s own.
10
PARTI
THE BLUE LADY
So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly; ...

Then I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness.
The wise man has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in
darkness; and yet I perceived that one fate comes to all of them.
—Ecclesiastes 2:12-14
I lived a life but nothing I’ve gained

Each day I’m full of sorrow and pain
No one seems enough for poor me
To give me a word of sympathy
Oh me, oh my
Wonder what will the end be
Oh me, oh my
Wonder what will become of poor me
—“Worried Life Blues,”

sung by Bessie Smith
Melancholia I, engraving by Albrecht Durer
CHAPTER ONE
Meeting the Blue Lady

enturies before Rodin sculpted “The Thinker,” Albrecht Durer
C (1471-1528) did a series of engravings of “Dame Melancholy,” the

best known of which is “Melencolia I,” which opens this book and
serves as its Muse. The resemblance in the postures and mood of “The
Thinker” and “Melancholy” is not accidental, since both portray something
of the essence of melancholy: its weight, its preoccupation with intense
thought, the heavy head, and a sense of quiet power and strength which yet
does not move.
Earlier medieval representations of the melancholic temperament
showed such persons as dark-skinned, having a “lean and hungry look,” as
Shakespeare described the disloyal Cassius in Julius Caesar.1 The visual image
was a physiological stereotype, informed by the medical theory of humors
and showing melancholics as those most prone to sin, figures of pathology.
But in Diirer’s Renaissance portrait, reflecting a psychological appraisal of
the melancholic condition, what was dark-skinned in an earlier time is now
darkly-shadowed.
John Milton gives us the literary counterpart to Diirer’s visual image
in Il Pensero, written in his mature years and after he became totally blind at
the age of forty-four. If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are those
thousand, for Milton captures Diirer’s image in language elegant and precise
and suffused with her mood, as the engraving captures the elegance and
precision of the poem. Wonderful to think that though Milton was born
eighty years after Diirer died, and separated as well by the cultural expanse
between England and Germany, yet both knew Melancholy as a divine Muse,
a figure of towering strength, beautiful, brooding, worthy of great honor.
But hail! thou goddess sage and holy!

Hail, divinest Melancholy!
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight,

And therefore to our weaker view
O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue ....2
The shadow that falls over Melancholy’s face in Diirer’s portrait subdues
her brilliance, which, as Milton says, would be too bright for human eyes.
It is an extraordinary insight into the depth of the ancient dark affliction to
see in it blinding light, a radiance of wisdom.
It is Milton, also, who calls Melancholy the “daughter of Saturn,” that
great and terrible ancient god, who for thousands of years has been the bringer
of darkness, oppression, restriction, and whose heavy hand confers an
unwanted fate to his psychological children. Diirer’s engraving is rich with
details that point to the intricate and intimate relationship Melancholy has
with this dark god. And it is through this intimacy that we find in the Blue
Lady a different, even redeeming, experience of the melancholic condition
from the modern idea of “depression.”
With the appearance of melancholy personified as a woman of
compressed power, the whole fantasy of melancholy changes. Through her
we can leave the sterile, truncated modern-day conception of “depression”
and turn our gaze to meet hers, seeing there the intensity of feeling, the
pressing need, the stillness of a moment in which nothing is happening but
anything might emerge. She personifies contemplation, meditation,
reflection, wisdom which knows how to wait; and at the same time she
radiates a certain tension, as if allowing wisdom to come is a tiring physical
act, and she shows a certain strain, the weariness of thinking inwardly and
downwardly, and still no conclusion ....
As she has visited so many, let us now visit her. Step into the frame of
Diirer’s engraving—it is crowded, but there is room—and, before you even
look around at the clutter or at Dame Melancholy herself, listen. Listen
carefully, and you will hear—nothing. She sits in silence. No sound bytes of
television news, no Muzak from unseen speakers in elevators, no recorded
messages, no radio talk shows or rock music, no words of comfort from one
you love. It is a silence of deprivation. But there is also relief in it, respite,
calmness, maybe even peace.
18
MEETING THE BLUE LADY
As you relax into being in her presence, look around, observe her world,
take notice of how she appears and the strange objects that surround her. This
is her domain, and it is very old, and she is always alone in it, and quiet, though
the restlessness in her body is almost palpable.
The propped-up head. As you sit down facing her—just inside the left
frame perhaps, amongst the clutter—-it might be an unconscious imitative
gesture to adopt her characteristic position of propping up your head with
your hand. It is a gesture so long connected with melancholy that in ancient
Egypt, the drooping, heavy head had already been long associated with grief,
but also with fatigue, or creative thought. It came to express the triad, grief/
fatigue/meditation, as characteristic of melancholy. The grief is more than
“object loss” or personal sorrow; it is also the grief of the suffering of the
human condition, the sorrow of limitation and mortality, and the loss of
innocence, weight of guilt, depth of shame.
From earliest times the bowed or lowered head has also carried the
meaning of submission, or acquiescence, or resignation. The melancholic
condition requires submission—the Lady will be served, for if you do not
yield to her she will visit all manner of miseries upon you, all those symptoms
of pointless depression: confusion, lethargy, joylessness, suicidal despair. Hell
hath no fury like Dame Melancholy scorned. Offer her Prozac and she will
give you the back of her hand in contempt. If she calls you, turning a deaf
ear to her will avail nothing, for she will pursue and hound and harass you,
wanting your embrace even though she is likely to crush you with her size,
her bulk, her weight, her demand for respect and her insistence that you
accept your fate, be who you in fact are, and live the life you have been given.
Protest all you like, but in the end, as happened to the mighty Prometheus,
victory is signified by submission, and you must wear the wreath.
Look at the Wreath-. You have seen this before, this lovely circlet of
bent twig and leaves, in pictures of great emperors. But because the Lady is
so melancholy and alone, it seems strange to see her wear this emblem of
crowning success and recognition. If you asked her, she might explain that
the wreath she wears on her head makes her a “laureate,” recognizing her
genius for letters and poetry.3 According to the ancient Greeks, the laurel
wreath was first bent into a round shape by Prometheus, who made it an
19
encirclement of the head to signify his submission to Zeus, and, more

profoundly, to Fate. In ancient competitions, the laurel wreath was awarded
to the poet, athlete, musician, orator who excelled. But once the winner
accepted the leafy crown, he also accepted his Fate: no longer was it a choice
to write poetry, to run swiftly, to compose music, to deliver passionate oratory,
but a necessity, a calling which could not be escaped. One submitted to Fate
when one bowed one’s head to accept the wreath. To the victor belongs the
responsibility of one’s gift.
The wreath marks the point of no return: once the wreath is in place,
there is no escape from one’s vocation, no hope of revocation, no chance for
a change of mind. The wreath signifies not a choice one makes but the
imposition of Necessity: the goddess Ananke, as the Greeks named her. Jesus
was compelled by Necessity to crucifixion once the wreath of thorns was
placed on his head; monks were tonsured to create a wreath of hair, signifying
their submission to the monastic call. “The Lord is my portion,” they sang
liturgically, the word “portion” coming from the original Greek, meaning
“lot” or “portion of fate.” Thus the wreath carried a double meaning: on
one hand, it symbolized submission to one’s fate, the acceptance of one’s gift
and vocation. And on the other hand, it signified that one’s gift and vocation
has been recognized and acclaimed publicly.
In modern times the wreath given to an Olympic champion has been
replaced by the circle of ribbon with its gold, silver, or bronze medal, but
the ancient meaning still lives, and it is interesting that while the medal
winner stands elevated to receive the crowd’s cheers, the champion’s head
must still bow to receive the medal. In our time, for those who are not
Olympians and may not be heralded at all in public forums, the wreath is
invisible, and the cheering crowd may be limited to one’s immediate family
and/or circle of friends. But it brings the same demand, requires the same
response. So the poets and Caesars and Olympic champions all wear the
wreath, and this is how we know they are called by Fate and have been
endowed with the ability to answer the call. And when you feel the weight
of an inner calling, making your head heavy with doubt, this is how you
know you, too, have been touched by the hand of Fate, and given a gift you
dare not refuse.
20
The wreath worn by Dame Melancholy in Diirer’s engraving makes the

same double meaning apparent for the melancholic: there is no changing one’s
temperament or character, which, as Heraclitus reminds us, is Fate; and one
is impressed with a certain daimon (genius) which presses to be brought into
life. Melancholy is the bestowal of a wreath, a calling, by a divinity, Fate, to
whom even all the gods are subject.
Look at the clenchedfist: Now notice that the hand that supports the
Lady’s head is not open, not merely a resting place for that weary mind. Her
fist is clenched tight, and if you try this yourself, you will notice how a certain
tension instantly enters your body. In earlier representations of melancholy,
the clenched fist had been a symptom of disease, expressive of the anguish
that accompanies illness, and the spasms in the fingers (clenching and
unclenching) were thought to be a medical symptom typical of
melancholia. But in Diirer’s engraving it comes to symbolize the fanatical
concentration of a mind which has truly grasped a problem, but which
at the same moment feels itself incapable of either solving it or dismissing
it. As the clenched fist suggests grasping possessiveness, so it also suggests
a state of obsession. Can’t let it go, can’t get over it, can’t get through it—
whatever “it” is. Who has not suffered this tension with Dame Melancholy?
The earlier historical association of the clenched fist also pointed to
the avarice typical of the melancholic temperament and denounced as sin.
Avarice referred to Saturn’s cold nature as grasping, stingy, and stringent.
But the meaning is changed somewhat in the Renaissance vision. Here there
are many meanings, but amongst them is containment, or concentration of
thought and attention. The closed fist may also signify constraint of mind—
a capable mind, but also an unwillingness to be possessed, obsessed,
compelled to such depth and quality of attention to the inward state.
The tightly closed fist gives a very different portrayal of the state of
melancholy from that given in earlier representations, in which the hands hung
loosely, in the indolence or laziness of sloth, or in the empty despair of acedie,
that horrible condition where there is nothing to hold on to, not even straws
to grasp. Here the clenched fist concentrates grief, intensity, profound thought,
and containment of energy, all of which typifies the melancholic attitude. And
the fist supports the weight of the head, full of heavy, often dark, thoughts.
21
Now notice the Grindstone-. Even though the figure of Dame

Melancholy seems to be held in a certain mental tension, the unused
grindstone (to her right), together with the closed book on her lap, indicate
that she is doing nothing. While the whole scene, and particularly her body,
seem alive with potential energy and anticipated movement, nevertheless
nothing moves; she sits very still. No fidgeting, fussing, fretting. Poised
for action, but non-active. There may be a link here with the older ideas
of melancholy as “slothful,” acedie as dullness of spirit and purposelessness
of activity. These unused objects, infused still with that older image,
remind me of the hours I spend sitting at my desk staring out my window.
At these times, I suppose my gaze is very much like the one Lady
Melancholy wears in this engraving: looking out with concentration but
seeing only within, intensely, often in distress. While I sit and stare, my tools
lie idle, the computer sleeping, the books closed, the pencils unsharpened ....
Yet there is work waiting: the nose must, at some point, return to the
grindstone. When work comes from and is related to one’s character, is an
expression of it, then one may be both melancholic and productive and find
a certain joy in life and work. When work is unrelated to one’s character or
calling, without meaning, there is “depression.”
Now, the purse and keys-. See there, from the belt around her waist—
almost lost in the folds of her dress—a small purse, and a key. A skeleton key,
as we call it, already, in her world, suggesting death. Or perhaps she will tell
us it is a key that opens to the bare bones of her character. But there is no
lock in her vicinity; whatever the key opens is invisible.
The traditional motif of the purse indicates the great riches and benefits
that belong to this psychological condition. Also portrayed here are the
melancholic’s avarice and miserliness, associations with money and property
as saturnine concerns. The god Saturn, who invented money, was both miser
and the author of prosperity. But now Dame Melancholy, or the “Daughter
of Saturn” as the poet Milton called her, becomes keeper of the purse and the
keys to open Saturn’s great treasure house, signifying that the blessings of the
old, harsh, miserly father Saturn are now accessible through his daughter. It
is the Blue Lady who holds the means of access, the keys, to the depths of
Saturn were his treasure lies buried.
22
The idea that Dame Melancholy can open the treasures that lie buried
deep within Saturn suggests that the way out of the misery of depression is
through the suffering of melancholy, and particularly of a melancholy that can
receive the creative wealth of the unconscious psyche. The keys are no longer
in Saturn’s avaricious grasp but right there at her waist, at the ready, part of
her. Those who fall under or live in her shadow have access to those depths,
those riches. In a very real sense, Dame Melancholy is herself the key to Saturn,
so that his gifts are no longer enclosed in his cold heart. She makes his
characteristics and benefits available to those who would receive them: the
discipline to carry through sustained mental work, steadiness and
groundedness in the face of emotional upheavals (remember that Saturn has
much more gravity than Earth), a rich memory, a love of history even while
one mourns the past, an appreciation for the blueness of mood that helps
one see life as it really is and not as one would wish it to be, and the stark,
sometimes bittersweet, pleasure of contemplation, even when this must
include death.
The dog belongs to her. From Aristotle’s time the dog had been
associated with Saturn and the melancholic temperament, and signified the
spleen. It was linked with the work of prophets and scholars—two primary
occupations of melancholics—because the dog, more than any other creature,
“has a very serious and sensitive nature and can fall victim to madness, and
like deep thinkers is inclined to be always on the hunt, smelling things out,
and sticking to them.”4 The dog’s tendency to defend its territory with ferocity
and tenacity, and its susceptibility to “madness,” both point to qualities of
Saturn. Yet the dog is known also for its constancy as a companion animal
to humans, always right by our side—just like the “whiff of melancholy”
William James said was always ready to rise up. The dog in Differs engraving
is not particularly attractive, certainly not a cute dog. It lies at the feet of
Dame Melancholy, apparently sleeping, but the feeling it gives is of unrelaxed
stiffness, as if it suffers from bad dreams. The Blue Lady’s companion
enhances her disposition to scholarly pursuits and deep thought, but it also
lies ominously in wait, ready to hound her with dark moods as soon as some
small stirring wakens it. And so for now, while we are here with her, we
will let it lie ....
23
Do you see the bat? As from the intensity of the Lady herself, you might
involuntarily recoil from the bat, that companion of vampires and monsters,
that denizen of cobwebbed attics in which are locked madwomen, intolerable
memories, unbearable secrets. But it is this same despised, ugly creature that
bears the banner carrying the name of the Lady herself. For centuries the bat,
the classic animal of the night, was symbolic of melancholics. The Renaissance
Humanists took it as signifying the night vigil or nightly work to which
melancholics were inclined, sometimes compelled; and some, like Ficino, saw
in it a warning of the destructive effect of long nights of study.
In ancient times the bat’s thin wing membranes were used for writing,
like paper, “particularly in setting down spells against sleeplessness.”5
Melancholics frequently suffer from insomnia; the night, for them, is the
time of the occult, the restless hours of compulsive mental activity, unsettled
hours in which all one’s demons are free to attack with sharp bat-teeth tearings
of shame and guilt, recriminations, failings, and regrets. The night is far more
alive than the day, which is merely a gateway to the deep interiority of the
life of the soul. Melancholics, then, have an obvious metaphorical affinity with
bats, who cannot see well at all and so are always in the dark, and must find
their way by some inner sonic sense, following internal rhythms rather than
external markers to guide them to their destination—or destiny.
Now, the wings-. The Lady’s wings are possibly the most beautiful, and
strangest, of her features. See how they are not fully folded, but not entirely
spread either. They are heavy, but not overly large or disproportionate to
her figure. Step a little closer, she is too preoccupied to notice, and won’t
mind if you touch the feathers. Soft, not rough. You could spend hours just
stroking those feathers, softer even than cat fur or velvet, so light to the touch.
Perhaps you hadn’t realized before how sensuous it is to touch the feathered
wings of Melancholy ....
Her wings are intrinsic to her nature, part of her body, and suggest
the capacity to escape the melancholic gravity, the seriousness, that would
keep her from rising too far above the earth. But there is a constriction in
the way Durer has portrayed these wings: there is no room for them to open
to flight. On Dame Melancholy’s right side is a wall from which hang Saturn’s
scales, a large planed stone, a sleeping dog at her feet, and pressing against
24
the right wing itself is a little cherub, a putti, an infant Eros perhaps—a just-
born desire—but somehow old-looking and sitting in the same position as
the woman, almost a visual echo, with the same intensity of gaze and air of
preoccupation. On Dame Melancholy’s left side is the border of the
engraving—the boundary beyond which she cannot go, and which keeps her
confined or constricted within her own realm, her intensity undissipated. She
looks almost cramped amid the clutter of objects. It is not possible to say
whether she is unable to open her wings, or whether she fears she will fall, or
whether she sees no point in trying. “A genius with wings that she will not
unfold, with a key that she will not use to unlock, with laurels on her brow,
but with no smile of victory.”6
Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, writes at length of
“religious melancholy” as both a longing for, and an inability to reach, the
“beauty of God.” The wings are the means by which one soars to
contemplation of this great alluring mystery. St. Bonaventura had written
of “a divine melancholy, a spiritual wing.” And of the beauty of God, which
so far surpasses the beauty of any mere mortal or created thing, St. Gregory
speaks of “the wing of meditation which lifts us up ....”7 The association
of the wings with spiritual flight heightens the tension of the earthbound
figure and makes all the more poignant the sense of confinement,
limitation, constriction, the inability to see into or beyond despite the
intensity of the gaze, and the doubt that is so characteristic of the
melancholic soul. The picture of Dame Melancholy is not a portrait of solid
faith, not an image of rising spirit—the picture only hints at such
possibilities, but of course, melancholy would not be melancholy if such
possibilities could be fully realized.
Now, finally, turn your gaze to the rainbow, and remember all the
feelings you’ve had when you saw one. But do not allow your hopes to rise.
It promises nothing.
The temptation is to see the rainbow as an emblem of hope, distant
but there. But Dame Melancholy seems entirely unaware of its presence, and
the rays of the dark sun behind it do not reach her. She is neither hopeful
nor enlightened. Dante would recognize her as one who has entered Hell,
since she seems to have abandoned all hope upon entering her melancholic
25
sphere. Durer portrays one of the profound torments and paradoxes of

melancholia in this engraving: there is light, there is a rainbow after
storms—but they are unreachable, irrelevant or meaningless to one who
is absorbed in a melancholy of one’s own. Keats knew: “When the
melancholy fit shall fall sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,” the
rainbow, like the morning rose, is something on which to “glut thy
sorrow,” not lift your hopes.
For the Lady, the rainbow does not appear as the end of storms, the
joyful color of expectations made possible, against the backdrop of a bright,
heartening sun. In this scene, the twilight in which Melancholy sits, with
heavy wreathed head and intense gaze, denotes “the uncanny twilight of a
mind, which can neither cast its thoughts away into the darkness nor bring
them to the light.”8
The rainbow adds color to the melancholic mood but does not cure
it, and the colors themselves are muted tones of slowly darkening blues, soft
violet, deepening purple, silver shading to gray. No bright reds, no glaring
yellows, no promising greens. The Blue Lady, wrapped in her April shroud,
knows that the rainbow starts nowhere and goes nowhere, and there is no
pot of gold at the end of it. And this realization may be why Judy Garland’s
anthem from The Wizard of Oz has become so loved for its poignancy and
sad melancholy, asking the question for which there is no answer: “If happy
little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh why, can’t I?”
26
PART II
DAME MELANCHOLY’S TALES
Then I considered all that my hands had done

and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold,
all was vanity and a striving after wind ....
—Ecclesiastes 2:11
A lady so fine and soulful

Can still be blue, that’s for sure.
She might make lots of money, but a
troubled heart can make her poor.
And if blues is her sadness
Then blues music is her cure.
—“Blues Lover,”
sung by Steady Rollin Bob Margolin
CHAPTER TWO
Dame Melancholy’s Family

SCENE: Home ofDr. Robert Burton, parish of Seagrave, England,
July 28,1638
he comes to the oaken door, pulls on the bell rope. It is the deepest
S hour of the night. It is summer, not her best season, and her dark blue
voluminous gown is caked with mud along the hem from the evening
rain. The gown, like the woman, shows unmistakable signs of wear. As she
waits for admittance, she thinks how little it matters whether anyone answers
or not. And yet she has come, tired as she is, and her second thought is that
even if nothing is gained this time, nothing will be lost either. This, she
knows, is not hope, but logic.
The Reverend Dr. Robert Burton answers the door, having wrapped
himself in an old dressing robe, wearing a small nightcap against the late
night chill that sometimes falls even in summer. Besides, Dr. Burton is 61
years old and often feels every minute of it, and suffers from what he refers
to as loss of heat in the blood.
He recognizes her, with a small gasp of surprise and annoyance. They
have met before. In fact, she has been a companion of his for more years
than he can remember, and while they live outwardly in separate quarters
and she has never literally shared his bed, yet her form, her face, her essence,
has been with him always, and she is as close to him as his own heart.
Now she is in need, again, although she has never been so desperate as
to seek him out like this, unannounced, so late at night, catching him
unprepared. Usually she comes at twilight and stays long into the evening, or
in the early morning, which makes it difficult for him to begin his day’s work,
and sometimes she extends her visit to days or weeks, even on occasion several
months. But never has she come at such a late hour and awakened him.
Perhaps, he thinks, she comes late because I am old and will die soon. She will
probably never die, and this makes her unmindful of the discourteous hour.
He invites her in, lights the candles in the room. He tries to keep this
room more or less tidy, but the vast collection of books and papers and pieces
of unfinished manuscripts that inhabit this library room manage to drift into
most of the spaces in the house when he is not looking. He is not married
and does not entertain often. This is his private world, and he is reclusive,
but he has journeyed farther in his mind than he could ever go in actual
travel. His dearest friends are all dead, the ancient philosophers and
theologians whose works he reads as if they were intimate letters to him alone.
He is known as a scholar and an honest man of wisdom, melancholic, devout
in faith, of good humor, though capable of sharp invective in the face of
superstition and foolishness. The room is so full of his books that the ideas
in them seem palpable, the room itself furnished with his thoughts. He clears
a pile of recent notes from one of two chairs and offers it to his guest.
Though she moves a bit stiffly, she has lost none of her grace. He feels
ponderous and slow next to her. How many times has a meeting like this
happened between them? Uncountable. She is so much older than he, at
least two millennia. Probably more. He offers her tea which she accepts but
then forgets to notice and does not drink it.
“So, you have come again. For what purpose, good Dame Melancholy,
have you need of me? It is late, we should both be abed.”
“Ah, Doctor,” she sighs deeply. “It is the old malady; I have not
changed. The old story must be told again.”
“I see,” says Dr. Burton, instantly softening, his irritation evaporating
with the steam of his dark tea. “Well, then, old friend, I can offer you less
counsel than a willing ear, and less cure than a tale or two to match your
own, and perhaps thereby give you some small comfort. One story deserves
another. Please, begin.”
She focuses her intense gaze at the dark wood grain of the floor, her
face half-shadowed, brow furrowed, and raising her left arm on its chair rest,
she props her heavy head on her fist. For a long moment she is silent, and
Dr. Burton wonders, with a tremor of fear, if she has waited too long, if the
despair has gone too deep into her bones, if this telling of the old story will
be the last time.
But she sighs deeply and says, “Let me tell you about my Father.”
32
DAME MELANCHOLY ’S FAMILY
Dame Melancholy’s Story of Saturn
y Father, Saturn—first called “Chronos”—was a great king in the

M time the ancient Greeks called the Golden Age. I don’t know why it
was thought to be “golden”—there was unhappiness and sickness and death
for mortals as there has always been. But perhaps they called it “golden”
because it was so long before even human memory, when the world was
young and had not grown jaded with the burdens of supporting its life. It
was said in those days that men lived like gods and death was nothing more
than sleep, and when Chronos finally left Olympus, he was king of the
Islands of the Blessed, where those favored by the gods went when Death
came for them.
My Father was a difficult god—all the other gods would agree—and
his poor wife Rhea suffered most as the mother of his children. Even more
than his own father, Chronos was fearful and paranoid lest one of his
offspring rise up to overthrow him and take his throne. It was the same fear
that drove his father to commit horrible crimes against his children. I have
to shake my head and half-smile when I think how more than three hundred
years from now people will be talking about “dysfunctional families.” The
phrase does not even begin to describe my Father’s fear and rage, nor his
wife’s grief and desire for revenge. One of our ancient poets, Hesiod, told
the story, but let me summarize it for you:
Great Kronos devoured all his children as soon as each of them

had left its mother’s [Rhea] sacred womb. ... He was king
amongst the sons of Ouranos and did not wish any other god
to succeed his possession of this dignity. He had been told by
Gaia, his mother, and by his father, the starry Sky, that he was
fated to be overthrown by a powerful son. He was therefore
continually on his guard, and swallowed his children. For Rhea
this was an insupportable grief. So, when she was about to give
birth to Zeus, the future father of gods and men, she turned in
supplication to her parents, the Earth and the starry Sky, for good
counsel as to how she might bring the child secretly into the
world and also take vengeance for the children whom the great
Kronos, the tortuous thinker, had swallowed.1
33
Of course, as in any family, you know only part of the story when you
have only one point of view. My Father’s fear is understandable, if not
excusable—but then, he was a god, and gods are not subject to human
judgment. And with all his tyranny, still, he harbors many gifts and blessings,
and I can tell you from my own experience that if you are willing to pay
him respect and honor as befits a king and god, he will reward you with all
he has. Look: he has given me his own purse and keys.
You see, there is another side to Saturn, the Swallower, the Tortuous
Thinker. There is a quality in him of great depth and sadness. This is why I
am so like him. The great poet Keats, of whom I am especially fond, will
understand well how Saturn suffered loneliness and sorrow. Too bad you
precede him by two centuries, Dr. Burton, and cannot know his work; it
would give you a most bittersweet pleasure. He will write this of my Father:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone ...
Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.2
You must understand, Dr. Burton, that as god of time, Chronos/Saturn

is not only the god of seasons and seasonal change, but the one who also
moves things into the depths of timeless experience. He governs cyclical
change and establishes permanence; he is lord of things both transient and
eternal. As mortals, you are forced to an intimate acquaintance with that
quality of Time that brings decay, destruction, death.
I know well that Saturn’s nature is opposed to change, and so he reigns
over that in humans which remains unchanged in essence, that which cannot
be essentially changed; and the knowledge of this unchangeableness may
become acedie, spiritual despair. There is no salvation. But then again, life
by definition being mutable, nothing lasts either—not even despair. That
34
DAME MELANCHOLY’S FAMILY
all things pass away, and that all remains the same, is the lesson from the biblical
Book of Ecclesiastes, from the ancient Greeks, from my friend Keats, and from
you, Dr. Burton, and your kindred spirits. It is a lesson I know well, but
sometimes—and this may surprise you, good friend—I long dearly for
mortality, to break the endless cycle. I have lived as long as humankind has
walked on the earth, and will be companion to mortals as long as they exist.
But it is a great burden to know the future, an even greater burden to always
remember the past, and the most difficult burden of all is to see how little
difference there is between them.
Author’s Interjection: Saturn in the Middle Ages
ith the ascendancy of Christianity in the medieval period in Western
W Europe, the image of Saturn underwent a partial metamorphosis.

While retaining much of his pre-Christian character, Saturn took on some
of the functions of God the Father in the Christian trinity. The two divine
figures almost blended, each bearing a striking resemblance to the other in
their mutual qualities. In keeping with Saturn’s misogynist disposition, and
with Yahweh’s asexual nature, the medieval heavenly Father has no wife, no
consort, no sister, and no daughter. This Father, however, is not the
benevolent deity of later Christian humanism or modern theologies of divine
compassion. In the Middle Ages he is stern and uncompromising. His love
is abstract and his punishment of sin is concrete.
Though the pre-scientific, medieval period has been called “The Age
of Faith”—everyone believed, and even the educated were afraid of hell—it
could also be called “The Age of Melancholy.” If the blues had been invented,
everyone would have sung them instead of Gregorian chants. Life was hard
and short, and the best hope in life was to die in your own bed in your sleep.
The purpose of your faith was to give hope for something better after death,
but there was nothing in the theology or preaching of the day that would
lead you to believe your hope was well-founded, or to give you comfort, or
to make you feel loved. That was not God’s main business.
God the Father appears in his attributes and qualities much like the
older god Saturn, one of whose obsessions was the swallowing of his children.
Saturn swallows his offspring in paranoid defense against being overthrown
35
(“I, the Lord, am a jealous God; thou shalt have no other gods before me.”)
He both brings forth and swallows up. In the medieval religious imagination,
swallowing is one image of how God loves. It is not only the created
individual who suffers from an insatiable hunger for the Creator, but also
God himself who hungers for his offspring. A medieval book, The Mirror of
Eternal Salvation, says:
His hunger is immensely great; He consumes us entirely to the

bottom, for He is a greedy glutton with a voracious hunger;
He devours even the marrow of our bones. ... First He prepares
His repast and in His love He burns up all our sins and our
faults. Next, when we are purified and roasted by the fire of
love, He opens His mouth like a voracious being who wishes
to swallow all.3
Who cannot immediately think of Goya’s shocking and horrific image

of Saturn swallowing his grown child head first?
Though it might strike us as strange, the image of the Swallowing God
is not as outdated as it might seem. A few years ago, a successful, sensitive
man in his early thirties, came to analysis depressed because, as he put it, he
had lost his youthful idealism. He had this dream:
I am in a vast factory basement, where tired old men tend huge

machines. A little girl is trapped on a conveyor belt, held by an arm
of the machine that looks like a claw, about to be swallowed into
the body of the machine. She screams to be saved. I am helpless to
save her and look on in horror.
This man’s dream is from 1992, but his melancholic ancestor might well
have had one like it in 1292, set in the furnace of Hell instead of a modern
factory, and instead of a devilish machine, the very maw of the Devil himself.
They are brothers, these sons of Saturn, “tired old men” before their time,
watching helplessly in horror as their innocence and idealism are devoured
by an insatiable God.
The biblical prophets tell us that it is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God, but I think it is even more fearful to fall into the
mouth of the Swallowing God. A year or so after I began Jungian analysis, at
36
the tender but already patriarchally damaged age of twenty-two, I had

this dream:
I am in a place like the Garden ofEden with other people-beings.

There is a Deity who lounges, half-reclining, in the middle of the
garden. It commands all living things. It is a gigantic figure; as it
lies back relaxing, the little people-beings jump and climb happily
all over it. There is a tree nearby, growing grapes or cherries. The
people-beings think the Deity would enjoy one, so I climb the tree,
pick a grape, and drop it into the Deity’s mouth. But I am very high
up and the Deity’s mouth is very large, and I lose my balance and
fall into the God’s mouth. I plunge down as in slow motion,
interminably, through this cavernous mouth which glows a rosy pink
color, but it darkens as the lower throat area becomes more and more
narrow. I can feel myself being pushed through the epiglottis by
contracting muscles and am being squeezed and suffocated to death.
I wake up quaking with terror, struggling to climb out ofthe mouth
of God....
As Mother Rhea found a way to rescue her children from the

Swallower, so also did I emerge after a long time stuck in the divine
epiglottis. And eventually I found it is true that if one survives the
constriction, Saturn’s benefits are in direct proportion to the pain he inflicts.
I think of it as a forty-year apprenticeship served with the “Tortuous
Thinker” during which, like Ecclesiastes, I set my mind to learn wisdom,
but knew madness and folly instead. It became apparent that being able
to discern the just-so-ness of some things is not necessarily always a matter
for despair, but contentment.
SCENE: Brooklyn, New York, Long Island, 1913-1973

A Tale of Dame Melancholy’s Brother: Portrait of My Father
y father wore the clothes of an old man. He was the kind of man who
M was born old, who never did young things, never had a young thought.
No matter what his age, he wore his years like a tired old coat. When he
37
died, he died with the same absence of energy that had marked nearly all of
his adult life. A quiet, thirty-second heart attack for which he sat down in
his living room. My father died by default.
He told me a story, when I was small, about how he got run over by a
milk truck when he was ten years old. Playing stickball in the street, in
Brooklyn. He wasn’t hurt much because he had sense enough to lie flat
between the four wheels while the truck and its thousand bottles jolted over
him. He never admits to being afraid, when he tells this story, but I know
he was afraid then, or he wouldn’t have been telling it all those years later.
Still, it is hard for me to believe anything so dramatic as being run over by
a milk truck could ever have happened to my father, this mournful man who
rarely smiled and almost never laughed, and to whom nothing happened
after World War II. The milk truck accident must have been the first of two
dramatic events of his life (the second being seriously wounded in the war),
and so I believe the story, I believe he was run over. But I don’t believe he
was ever young enough to play stickball in the street.
My father was moody, given to sulks, and had a sullen, smouldering
sort of temper. He brooded. Even allowing for my acutely (and a bit falsely)
selective memory, I cannot remember him ever falling into an uncontrollable
belly laugh. There were times at the dinner table (at which he read the
newspaper) when my mother and younger sister and I, in a sorority of
sanguinity designed to offset his bile, fell into fits of unstoppable, stomach
aching laughter, provoked by something or someone imagined as splendidly
ridiculous and undignified. Our jokes were sophomoric and in bad taste,
but we found them screamingly funny. That laughter was contagious and
irresistible—and for me, trapped in my own deepening melancholy, it was
absolutely necessary for life. But my father was impervious and self-excluded.
He deemed such attacks of laughter unseemly, the childish indulgence
of giggling, silly girls. He retreated into an isolation darker than any of us
cared to know. When he was angry, he was unapproachable, radiating
saturnine rings of impenetrable zones of defense, through which no one
and nothing could pass. He locked himself in, his face turning darker, the
further inside he withdrew. The old god Saturn was both his protection and
his prison.
38
My father’s attitude toward age, and how he aged, also are revealing of
the saturnine, melancholic temperament. He was always old in my eyes. His
clothes, his moods, his coloring (dark hair, darker eyes), his perfunctory
manner of speaking and slightly sour inflection, were all of a piece. He acted
old and thought old and disparaged anything new or youthful, whether it
was modern art or my plans to run away and marry Elvis Presley.
It was as if, having come of age during the Great Depression (he turned
twenty-one in 1934), he put on those clothes and that despair and never took
them off. He was always slightly out of fashion, in spite of my mother’s
cajoling and consistent attempts to update him. We gave him chic ties and
shirts and sweaters for Father’s Day and his birthday, but he wore his clothes
as a duty, without flair, without pleasure. He felt shorts were humiliating
and never wore them, no matter how hot it was, never wore blue jeans, no
matter what sort of yard work he did, never wore sneakers. Only rarely did
he put on something as casual as a turtle neck sweater, mostly to please my
mother, but then it was Banion, and his reluctant modernity made it look
even more synthetic. His entire wardrobe was limited to circa-1946 style, as
if, having survived World War II combat, he now wanted to slow time to a
standstill, all movement toward death stopped in still life, framed in fixed
convention. So he wore only brown and dark blue pants, a couple of dark
suits, solid white and light blue shirts. And a collection of about fifty old
silk ties. Most of the time I remember him dressed in a pair of mid-1940’s
baggy suit pants, brown shoes from Thom McAnn, a plain shirt with sleeves
rolled up just above the elbows, open flat at the neck. He wore this when he
worked at his easel, when he mowed the lawn, when he took the car to be
fixed. When we went to a restaurant, he added a tie and conservative dark
blue sport jacket.
He could never have played stickball in the street, or anywhere else.
The idea of using his body for anything other than sitting seemed to horrify
him. He always moved slowly, as if his body was a delicate thing that might
break if forced to move too fast. He did not trust his body to do anything
right. He never ran. Even the need to walk fast occasionally, a walk-going-
on-jog (crossing a busy street or believing my sister was crying), upset him
terribly, destroying his whole sense of balance. He lumbered when he had
39
to move fast, his face muscles setting themselves into panic beyond his control,
and I believe his ungainliness reinforced his silent conviction that he lacked
physical grace.
He tended toward hypochondriasis, a common disposition in
melancholics, and this, too, lent him an air of fragility. He seemed not to want
to use his body or even touch it for fear of damaging it. If he ran, he would put
excess strain on his legs as well as his heart. If exercise made him breathe hard
it was clearly not good for his lungs, so he avoided it. He had ear problems
(another province of Saturn), and so did not swim for fear of getting water in
his ears and going deaf. He ate very, very slowly to avoid choking and strain
on his digestive system. He hated being outside, where the rain attacked him
and the sun made him squint (bad for the eyes) or sweat unnaturally. He never
went to doctors for fear they might find something wrong.
In the 1950s he was the adult man, I the young almost-woman; but
we were bound more closely, and uneasily, by our melancholic temperaments
than by genes and blood. We fought over everything except his work, which
was always magical to me. He was a renowned comic book artist, and I didn’t
know anybody else whose father was such a wonderful and famous artist,
whose work could be seen in any candy store on comic book racks at any
given time. And yet, like my father’s body, I was awkward when I had to
tell people what he did for a living, as if drawing comic books was a matter
of shame in some way I could not explain. I suspect, now, that the shame
was also, and more so, his own, for my father’s art was both his torment
and his redemption, and he never came to terms with either. For me, aspiring
then to be a literary artist myself, his work was both a source of
embarrassment and pride. It wasn’t like having paintings in a museum or
on the cover of Life or like Norman Rockwell’s pictures for the Saturday
Evening Post. Comics were lower class. I always knew my father was a better
artist than Norman Rockwell and much, much better than museum
painters, most of whose work looked like junk to me. Anybody could throw
paint around like Jackson Pollock, whose drippy splotches weren’t worth a
ten-cent comic book, as far as I was concerned. But still, it was “comic” art,
and both of us, silently, felt the same trace of contempt for his work that
the world spoke openly.
40
Art was probably the only thing my father and I agreed on, but that
meant we couldn’t talk about it. It would have been too much like
fraternizing with the enemy, too much letting down our guards. Though
neither of us could truly understand the sanguine temperament of my
mother and sister, we could not tolerate the bile in each other. Too close an
affinity produced hostility.
The battle lines were drawn for me, when I was in fifth grade, over
my horseback riding in summer and having to start “acting like a young
lady” and wearing dresses. A few years later, in 1957, the lines of war were
entrenched and barricaded when I declared my eternal love for Elvis Presley.
So great was my passion that I had to leave the dinner table if Elvis came on
the radio. For two and a half minutes my food got cold while in the next
room, close to the radio, I writhed and jerked and mouthed the lyrics. “All
Shook Up” drove me to a frenzy, but “Jailhouse Rock” sent me over the edge
of sanity. I couldn’t help it. It was the music, and some desperate, inchoate
need in me to expel the darkness, and also something in the way Elvis’s hair
fell wildly over his eyes. His hair was free. My father’s short hair never moved.
So it was with my father and his melancholia. He never understood
it; and even if he had, he apparently felt helpless to do anything with it, in
it, or for it. His world was a world of women, a condition which can never
be congenial to a male child of Saturn, for Saturn’s dry and cold masculinity
is repelled by all things feminine. My father, an only son with three sisters,
and father of two daughters and no sons, undoubtedly felt stranded and
betrayed in a female world. Added to this, he was afflicted with that terrible
psychological impotence which is also characteristic of Saturn, so that he
could neither escape his prison nor accept it.
If the sweet Muse of his art ever spoke lovingly to him, he turned a
deaf saturnine ear to her and fled from her unbridled, heated artistic
imagination, into the circumscribed arena of practical and predictable
commercial illustration. His was a life lived with no apparent options: he
understood only hard necessity and what the world expected of him. He
understood obligation, duty, responsibility, but “choice” was not in my
father’s vocabulary, “change” was a threat to his existence, and “possibility”
was beyond his range of vision.
41
He took care of his family as best he could: mated, fathered, husbanded,

worked hard and long. When he was 59, his heart, having been sadly neglected,
suddenly and fatally attacked him.
He would not have approved the hasty manner of his death.
42
CHAPTER THREE
Metamorphosis of the Blue Lady

(or, How the Lady Became a Tramp)
ood Dr. Burton, you are kind to hear my tales once again. I know
G it must be burdensome for you ...” Dame Melancholy looked at

her host with clear but tired eyes. “I do not bring much cheer when
I come, do I?”
Dr. Burton, refined in his natural courtesy through decades of ministry,
assured her it was no burden. “No one imparts so much learning as you do,
my Lady. How can that ever be burdensome?”
“All learning is burdensome, Doctor—you know that perhaps better
than anyone. But what I meant was none of it assuages your loneliness. And
I am no help.” She said it matter-of-factly, not in self-recrimination.
“Ah, well, you have seen a truth there—you are quite right about
learning doing little to relieve loneliness. Sometimes, being lost in my books,
I think I am unfit for human company, but for which I long dearly. And yet
I admit, I resent intrusions and those requirements of daily life that take me
away from my books.”
She smiled kindly at him. “You are in a long, noble tradition, my friend.
And it grieves me to say, history will treat neither of us very well.”
He looked at her quizzically, not understanding her cryptic comment.
“After you are gone, Dr. Burton—a loss I shall not suffer lightly—
your praiseworthy volume, The Anatomy ofMelancholy, will remain as one
of the last great tributes to me, though your name, I fear, will not be
known to many. But future times will not regard me very well, either. If
you wish to hear, I will tell you how my star, always dim at best, will fall
ever lower.”
Dr. Burton leaned forward to set his teacup down and looked at her
earnestly. “But Lady—how can that be? You are the daughter of a god, and
a Muse, a bringer of great gifts—”
The Blue Lady laughed softly. “Come, my good friend—we both know
I am also a bringer of gloom and sorrow and sometimes worse. You yourself
know it well and have written of it at length. Does such a future decline
surprise you?”
Dr. Burton took off his nightcap to rub his gray head and sat back again.
“No, ... I suppose it does not. But it is no comfort.” He paused. “Though
we have had difficult times together, you and I, still—it is a distress to me to
think you shall be treated with indignity. Why do you laugh at this?”
Now her smile broadened. “Because there is such folly in it. And I shall
always be a companion to mortals, so perhaps in the even farther future my
star will rise again and I shall be accorded the respect I deserve. But
meanwhile, the story of my decline is as full of humor as it is grief.”
“I don’t see how you can laugh at your own ill-treatment.”
“You laugh at yours, do you not? Besides, tragedy is only one face of
humanity. Humor is the necessary other. Humor, in fact, is what you are
made of. I can laugh about all sorts of things, especially failures, because I
do not expect very much else. Now, if you bring me some small tea cakes, I
shall give you a little amusement and tell you what is to become of me.”
Dame Melancholy’s Tale of Her Future History
y position has never been so precarious in the esteem of humans as it

M will be in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Dr.
Burton. By then I will be practically thrown on the dung heap. You see how
unkempt and raggedy I am in my natural state—I am neither proud nor
ashamed of it; it is just so—well, I will be made to appear worse. And people
will be very much afraid of me, afraid I will come to their door at twilight
as I come to you.
[Dr. Burton raised his hand to protest, but she smiled a little and waved
him to silence.]
I find it interesting to muse on how I began as a Lady of dignity, whose
father was a great god, and became, as the song will say, a tramp. The modern
story of me begins around the end of the eighteenth century in France, a
time which marks the flowering of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and
the demise of two kinds of what will then be called “neurosis”: vapeurs and
hypochondriasis. These are actually one neurosis, two sides of the same coin,
but determined by gender: women have vapeurs (“the vapors,” as you English
46
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BLUE LADY
call it), and men have hypochondriasis. The vapors consist of fainting and
nervous fits, a sort of sudden weakness with agitation. The image will become
a stereotype: half-clothed women falling into a swoon, in classical paintings
as well as in early movies. (Yes, Dr. Burton—motion pictures! You cannot
imagine it, but the motion picture will be a great artistic revolution. Many
of my friends will become famous through them, especially those melancholic
comedians of film’s early years—Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster
Keaton. Of course, I will not be given credit.)
In D. W. Griffith’s 1914 epic film, Birth ofA Nation—oh, I do wish
you could see it, Dr. Burton!-—the actress Lillian Gish sets the standard,
which will be followed for years to come, of the easily-overcome-with-heart-
thumping-emotion movie heroine, who swoons easily, romantically, and
predictably. The famous gestures of raising-the-limp-wristed-back-of-the-
hand-to-the-brow and clutching-at-breast-while-gasping-for-air are visual
summaries of an attack of female vapeurs. I personally think the word is lovely
too, because it conveys perfectly the wetness of the condition I know so well:
moist eyes glistening with heartbreaking tears, the dampness of hot
sentiment, and the liquid secretions in hidden sexual places. [Dr. Burton
shifted a little uneasily on hearing this.] The vapeurs were an outward
expression of inner agitation, and women who were so afflicted became the
classic image first of hysteria and later of the histrionic personality.
Now, this I find especially amusing. In pre-revolutionary France (yes,
Dr. Burton, you will be shocked to know that extravagant monarchy will
topple!), the literary genre of the novel will be thought to be a prime cause
of vapeurs. The novel! Let me tell you what they will say about this: “The
novel constitutes the milieu of perversion, par excellence, of all sensibility;
it detaches the soul from all that is immediate and natural in feeling and
leads it to an imaginary world of sentiments violent in proportion to their
unreality, and less controlled by the gentle laws of nature Isn’t that
funny, Doctor? Already you can see why there has always been such a close
connection between myself and “hysteria.” It is hysterical, don’t you think?
But wait, I have another: an article in the Gazette Salutaire of 6 October 1768
condemns novels for their effects on women:
47
The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers,

and continued reading generates every nervous complaint;
perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women’s health, the
principal one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in
the last hundred years. ... A girl who at ten reads instead of
running will, at twenty, be a woman with the vapors and not a
good nurse.2
Of course, a hundred years later, men will completely change their

minds and will fear that girls who go running instead of reading will have
the vapors and be unfit mothers. I confess, Dr. Burton, sometimes I don’t
know whether to laugh or cry.
Now, the French men, being men, will not have vapeurs—they are not
wet and full of sloppy sentiment—so they will have hypochondriasis, a much
longer word suggesting a much more substantial malady. This condition will
be characterized by fits of irritability and what will later be called general
depression, marked by annoyed tiredness and sullen moods. Just exactly what
you have already written about, Dr. Burton, but without the eloquence or
the same appreciation. In men, the agitation and weakness of the vapeurs
will be turned inward, where they will appear in the body as symptoms. (The
Enlightenment will prefer to have things wrong with the body and mind
rather than with the soul, you know, because it will think the body is more
fixable through medicine, and the mind amenable to rational thought. But
the soul—well, that is my natural province, it is naturally “wet” and
emotional and full of images which contradict an orderly, enlightened mind.)
I imagine that French wives and mistresses of 1768 will have to put up
with the same sort of peevish sulks in their men as their twenty-first century
counterparts who will follow. Even my wise friend Jung’s phrase describing
the Great Sulk as “anima possession” does not dignify the condition very
much. These will be the sort of men, nearly always of the aristocratic class,
who will come home after a hard day at Court and complain about whatever
has happened or is about to happen to them, who will find fault with the
way “she” does things, and who will be too tired to have sex with their
wives—which is probably just as well, since, having been reading novels all
day, the wife will by this time be suffering headache and an attack of the
48
vapeurs. In retrospect, it seems both men and women of the aristocracy develop
symptoms because they are bored. Time to have a revolution.
Strange to say, there will be a fairly good outcome to this, Dr. Burton.
The French Revolution will not only cure the aristocrats of their boredom,
it will eliminate them altogether. This political and social event will have
great consequence for what will become the field known as psychology: the
two categories of neurosis will be forced to emigrate, once those in whom
they resided are dispatched in the Reign ofTerror. Gone now are the coiffed,
elegantly gowned women, and with them their dramatic vapeurs-, gone are
the men in powdered wigs and lace cuffs and jeweled buckled shoes, and
with them their touchy hypochondriasis.
The prototypical form of what will become the definitive portrayal of
still-genderized forms of “depression” apparently disappears in France when
the aristocracy disappears. Only the leisured rich can really afford to indulge
the symptoms of their ailments; indeed, certain aspects of those symptoms
will almost become prerequisite for being recognized as a lady or gentleman
of the aristocracy. You can see, Dr. Burton, why I think the French Revolution
will be such a fortunate turn of events: I believe in democracy, and I bring
myself freely to persons of all stations in life. You are hardly a man of wealth,
Dr. Burton, and yet I count you amongst my dearest friends. As a Muse, I
find it distasteful to restrict my range of associations.
The entire climate of life that will make these neuroses possible—in a
rich leisure class—will come to an end in the Revolution, and those who
both enjoy the leisure and suffer the neurosis will come to an end with it.
Men of the middle class, which at this time has yet to emerge as a powerful
political force, will certainly suffer bouts of irritability and have a hard time
getting up in the morning to transact the day’s business, but this will be
considered part of life and usually someone else’s fault. Women will no doubt
suffer anxiety, fear of childbirth and its high mortality rate, and a life of
poverty if deserted by their husbands, but this, too, will be just the way it
is, and they will do what is necessary to survive. Peasants also surely will feel
weighed down with hopeless debt, impossible taxes, and an inability to move
out of their low station, but they too will have to attend to the daily business
of survival and will have no time to be neurotic. Or, put more accurately, a
49
poor person might be neurotic but won’t be able to afford to act neurotically.
The cows will still have to be milked, the wool still hauled to the village
market, and the landlord’s chateau still cleaned. Among the poor,
“depression” will know no gender-specific symptoms—as I said, I am a
democrat and may visit all equally. Both men and women will feel the
downward pull, but will nevertheless pull their weight.
But the genderized symptoms of the vapeurs and hypochondriasis will
emigrate from France (only to return less than a hundred years later) and
move on to England, Germany, and Austria, where they will receive new
names. In 1831, a scant forty years after French heads are cleared of vapeurs
and hypochondriasis by the guillotine, one of your own countrymen, the
English physician James Johnson, describes a new male neurosis. He calls
it, with surprising modernity, the “wear-and-tear syndrome.” I know the
phrase is unfamiliar to you, Dr. Burton, but Dr. Johnson thinks the
syndrome is peculiar to the English, owing to the strain of the Industrial
Revolution inaugurated in England. (Yes, another revolution. The future
is full of them. And it is interesting how neurotic categories seem so
dependent upon national revolutions.)
The stress and strain, observes Dr. Johnson, are from overwork, lack
of exercise—the French were partly right about young girls reading instead
of running!—and smog. (I find this last especially amusing, since “Los
Angeles” has not yet been invented.) The only remedy the good Dr. Johnson
knows is exactly the one his Greek predecessors, about whom you and I have
spoken so much, would have suggested two millennia earlier: travel abroad
and annual vacations. The wear-and-tear syndrome strikes only men, for the
obvious reason that upper- and middle-class women do not go to work in
factories and breathe smog, nor are they financially and politically involved
in revolutionizing industry and suffering the daily pressure of the fluctuating
fortunes of growing capitalist enterprises. Nobody, besides myself, pays much
attention to poor women because they are poor, and the women themselves
are completely absorbed in the harrowing daily effort to keep themselves and
their families alive. These women would not frame their condition in terms
of “depression,” “neurosis,” or any other kind of pathology—thank Saturn!—
but rather, if asked, as exhaustion, and a few shillings away from despair.
50
Of course, there is more to the story than meets the eye, as you would
know, Dr. Burton. The more subtle reason that only men are subject to wear
and tear is that Dr. Johnson, like his colleagues of the time, does not consider
female suffering to be in the same category as that of males. Being female
means that a woman is so different in biological, mental, and psychological
composition from men that her suffering must be of an entirely different
order altogether. Why, the female is thought to be practically a different
species, although your Charles Darwin has not yet arrived on the scene to
prove this idea wrong. And, as woman is thought to be “less” than man in
all categories, so too, her suffering is thought to be “less” than his. Women
are assumed to be far less industrious and not at all revolutionary. Since
women are believed to have no interest in the world outside of family and
children, their ailments—depressive or otherwise—must originate in their
deformed bodies (Aristotle’s view) and their limited mental capabilities
(everybody’s view).
It may not be ladylike of me, Dr. Burton, but I must at least grunt
loudly right here, because this sort of nonsense certainly does ruffle my
feathers and make my wings quiver. You see how they dismiss me! When I
think of that eager but ridiculous century, I don’t know whatever restrains
me from striking all of them with my full power, rendering them all too
unhappy to even think up such silly theories.
But there is no stopping them, and some ideas, I admit, are at least
interesting. In 1869, the American doctor George Beard identifies a syndrome
he calls “neurasthenia,” (literally, “weak nerves”), describing a condition of
physical and mental exhaustion in which work is impossible. The symptoms,
as Dr. Beard observes them, are: headaches; neuralgias; morbid
hypersensitivity to weather, noise, light, and the presence of other people;
sleeplessness; muscle tremors; and disturbances of the secretions. (Well, I
can easily understand the morbid hypersensitivity to the presence of other
people.) Bleak though this picture might be, neurasthenia is still compatible
with a long life, particularly since it afflicts only men, who are not likely to
die prematurely in childbirth. A neurasthenic man might live miserably, but
he could live long. Dr. Beard thinks the main cause of neurasthenia is
“dephosphorization of the nervous system.” Clever of him, don’t you think?
51
Even if you doubt this is the actual cause of the malady, it certainly is an apt
description of it: you quite literally don’t glow any more. Dr. Beard’s therapy
consists of “tonics” for the nervous system, both chemical and physical,
including muscular exercise, “general electrization,” phosphorous, strychnine,
and arsenic. I do hope these last two are in moderate doses.
In another metaphor, Dr. Beard will, later in his work, interpret
neurasthenia in terms of a balance of nervous energy. It works rather like
your household account ledger, Dr. Burton. Each individual has a correct
balance of nervous, or what will later be called psychic, energy. Using an
economic or financial model of energy (a model which my excellent protege,
Dr. Pierre Janet of France, will also employ several decades later), a
neurasthenic is described as a person who has overdrawn his account and
has gone into “nervous bankruptcy.”
Now, here’s something I find very interesting, Dr. Burton:
neurasthenia, as I’ve said, is a disease proper to men, and is thought to have
a specifically sexual etiology, involving disturbances of the secretions, and
presumably including impotence—forgive me if I speak frankly here, Dr.
Burton, but you have already written of these disturbances and attributed
them to immoderate or intemperate “venery,” one of the six “unnatural
things” you discuss in your fine book on my anatomy. But in the era of
which I speak, women of favored social position are exempted—not to say
excluded—from “work,” and have no interest in sexual matters, and so are
spared the syndrome.
So you see, as the French had their vapeurs and hypochondriasis, and
you English your wear-and-tear syndrome, so now the Americans have
neurasthenia. Dr. Beard describes this condition as an essentially American
neurosis (Americans often cannot bear not to have discovered almost
everything), caused by the same sorts of things that have apparently always
caused the same symptoms: climate, with extremes of heat/cold, humidity/
dryness (very much like the older theory of imbalanced humors), electricity
in the air, and a peculiar way of life. He says,
America, a young and rapidly growing nation with religious

liberty (“liberty as a cause of nervousness”) in process of
intensive economic development. Increased amount of work,
52
forethought (“prometheus”), punctuality, increase in speed of

life (railways, telegraph—this is the great age of westward
expansion in the United States), and repression of emotion (“an
exhausting process”).3
Dr. Beard foresees that neurasthenia will become common in Europe

if Europe ever becomes Americanized. And beyond even his foresight, there
will appear much later a Japanese version. Indeed, according to our
prophetic Dr. Beard, neurasthenia will become the neurosis of twentieth
century life itself.
As neurasthenia becomes more widespread as a diagnosis, its origin is
now thought to be more in constitutional factors than in hard work, and in
sexual disturbances and masturbation—I am sorry, Dr. Burton, but I speak
plainly and we do not agree on this—for they will consider that solitary
pleasure the fount of every form of depraved insanity. This is so much worse
than repressed emotion or extreme climate. I smile at this, but it still makes
me angry. Masturbation, as you yourself believe, has always been thought
to “weaken” a man by depleting his body of vitalizing sperm seed. One has
to be careful not to spill one’s seed too often and certainly not indiscriminately.
It is equivalent to spilling one’s life blood, except that one’s future, in the
form of progeny, goes with it.
By 1876, only a few years after Dr. Beard’s work has appeared, the
Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing assumes neurasthenia to be
primarily constitutional, hereditarily influenced, and a prominent factor in
cases of male masochism! My, it is astonishing how thinking changes so
quickly, and how so much is unfairly attributed to me! But he, too, will shake
a learned warning finger against the evils of that dreaded “M” word, always
to be spoken in hushed tones: masturbation. The only other word in the
psychiatric canon that will produce an equal feeling of dread and horror is
effemination. Hmmpph! Can’t keep my feathers smooth when I recall things
like this.
You can begin to see, Dr. Burton, how the image of me in my former
glory will begin to fade throughout the nineteenth century, when there will
be a proliferation of “new” neurotic syndromes identified. Most notable will
be the “phobias,” which will be incorporated as subforms of neurasthenia
53
in the nosologies. “Anxiety neurosis,” a condition in which there is no definite

object of the person’s fear, is also identified during this period and
distinguished from phobia, a condition in which the person’s fear has a
definite known object. But by the end of the nineteenth century, a mere one
hundred years after we began with vapeurs and hypochondriasis, the main
neuroses are back again and still in genderized form: hysteria for women,
neurasthenia for men.
For a long time it will be thought that hypnosis can provide the means
of a cure for these neurotic states, particularly among women (probably
because women are presumed to have less intellectual resistance to
suggestion), and so a great deal of psychiatric interest will turn to it. (You
would be interested in hypnosis, Dr. Burton, but you wouldn’t make a good
subject for it—you are very guarded against suggestion of that sort.) By the
end of the nineteenth century, hypnosis will have been practiced with varying
results for more than a hundred years, originally as “mesmerism,” following
Anton Mesmer’s attempts to “magnetize” and restore the balance of “universal
fluid” to his patients. Mr. Mesmer himself won’t be the best advertisement
for his therapy, for he seems not to be able to overcome his own recurring
“neurasthenic” or depressed condition (we can sympathize with him here,
can’t we, Dr. Burton?), twice abandoning his work and fleeing the country
when he falls into despondency. Hypnosis will not provide a cure. Eventually,
the renowned pioneer Dr. Sigmund Freud, who also begins with hypnosis,
will find a new approach, assisted initially by the hesitant Dr. Joseph Breuer
and with the enormous contribution (acknowledged for most of the wrong
reasons) of Miss Bertha Pappenhausen, otherwise famous as “Anna O.” You
would have liked Dr. Freud, Dr. Burton—you are both men of courage. (No,
no! No need for false modesty; Dr. Freud will not be known for his.)
Though women are supposedly spared the conditions that lead to
neurasthenia, they do have what doctors consider a female version of it:
hysteria. By 1900, hysteria is being explained by the theory of dual personality.
(Don’t be alarmed, Dr. Burton, I know it sounds like demon possession, but
keep in mind, these are male doctors very much removed from the actuality
of the women’s experience. They are a bit extreme, but it is interesting to see
how their minds work and where some of their discoveries lead.)
54
Alfred Binet, developer of IQ tests, cites the “division of

consciousness” that takes place in hysterical states, two states of
consciousness not known to each other, yet co-existent in the patient’s
mind. This makes some sense; I’m sure you’ve had that experience—even
though you’re a man. Surely, you have felt yourself divided in mind—one
part of you thinking this, another part preoccupied with something else
you don’t know about, except to make you distracted, agitated, perhaps—
well, perhaps melancholic. At the same time, Dr. Freud is formulating his
theory of “repression,” and we are only a few years away from Dr. Jung’s
theory of the “complex.” The idea that a woman’s womb and ovaries,
always suspect as the source of all her mental troubles, are the chief causes
of the hysterical condition begins to give way slowly to the idea that
there is a psychological explanation for “hysteria”—the new idea that
hysterical symptoms are the result of repressed memories of early sexual
trauma. And Dr. Freud’s theory of infantile and childhood sexuality
will help men, too—if you can think of it as helping—by providing a
way of understanding the male’s experience and subsequent symptoms
as an unsuccessful passage through the murky waters of the various
stages (oral, anal, oedipal, and so forth) of sexual development. You
remember, Dr. Burton, my father Chronos had some problems in this
delicate area. I’ve always been glad he was sent away to the Isles of the
Blessed long before he knew of Dr. Freud’s castration theory.
For women, however, the passage from infantile orality to adult
vaginal satisfaction is significantly murkier, and rarely completed: Dr.
Freud’s model simply will not work for women, who from Eve’s day in
Eden have known the pleasures of clitoral orgasm, enjoyed and/or suffered
sexual desires at least as compelling as those of men, and rarely fall so in
love with their fathers that they contemplate matricide.
I assure you, Dr. Burton, as a woman of considerable appetite myself,
I have never been so tempted. Male theorists and men in general have
assumed that women have no interest in sex, and if they do, it is symptomatic
of either immaturity, criminality, or hysterical neurosis. The comments of
Dr. A. F. A. King, an American gynecologist—in those days any credentialed
male person could have a psychological theory about women and get a
55
hearing—illustrate the general thinking about hysteria at the turn of that

century. In 1891, Dr. King declares:
First ... although “hundreds of cases of hysteria had been

recorded in males,” it is mostly a disease of women between
puberty and menopause, and especially in women whose sexual
wants remain ungratified; the attacks are more frequent in the
spring and summer, in idle women than in those engaged in the
struggle for existence. The attack never occurs when the patient
is alone. The patient is seemingly unconscious, but not really
so; during the attack, she does not seem too sick, “her beauty is
not impaired,” and many times she is particularly attractive to
men. While she is in that condition, a gentle touch of the hand
will produce violent pains, which disappear with a firm pressure
and rough handling. When the attack is over, the woman
invariably feels ashamed of it; she delights in evoking sympathy,
but the more she is given, the worse her condition becomes. In
short, one can say that “there is method in her madness”;
everything seems to be directed and the woman “appears to be
acting a part.” Her entire attitude is reminiscent of that of a
woman who exposes herself to be raped while seemingly
rejecting the idea. The fact that the patient is unaware of the
relationship between the attacks and her sexual needs is
explained by the theory of dual personality.4
So you see, Dr. Burton, if men have good reasons to be neurasthenic,

hypochondriacal, psychasthenic, neurotic, depressed, and melancholic,
women have equally good reasons, and they have Dr. King besides.
And now, my good and long-suffering friend, I think we are in need
of a few more of these excellent cakes. And, if you don’t mind, a nice glass
or two of your good French wine would be invigorating, wouldn’t you agree?
N Author’s Interjection
ow that Dame Melancholy has given a somewhat manic account of

her own recent history, a brief comment on mania itself seems in order.
Mania has been linked historically and clinically with melancholia, and later,
“depression,” as its other, brighter, face. One of the reasons for our entrenched
56
prejudice against melancholia is that the symptoms of mania have become

social criteria for “success” and “health.” (In fact, we often equate the two.)
According to the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the symptoms
of the manic condition (a “mood disorder”) are as follows:
1. An elevated, expansive, or irritable mood. Think of any politician either

propounding his own grand plan for national salvation or irritably
attacking his opponent.
2. An increase in activity level. Work more hours and help increase the
gross national product. Run more miles. Lift more weights. Go to
school year-round. Fill every available minute of every day. Idle minds
are the devil’s playground.
3. Unusual talkativeness, rapid speech. This is sometimes taken for wit and
cleverness. People who we think are dull-witted are called “slow,” but we
don’t listen well to anything that isn’t very loud and very fast. Much of
this kind of “speech” actually has little content and is often remarkably
independent of thought. Try any one of hundreds of talk shows on
television and radio, for examples.
4. Need little sleep. And so the factories hum twenty-four hours daily,
rushing toward maximum production in world competition. No siesta
mentality here!
5. Inflated self-esteem, belief in specialness. This is so much a part of

nationalism and patriotism that it is hard to see what could be pathological
about it. We try to foster this belief in “specialness” in therapy, in school,
in humanistic religious sermons. Any ego-oriented psychology, which is
what most modern psychology is, believes in the specialness of the
individual, and psychotherapeutic practice tends to inflate the patient.
Inflation is seen as the antidote to the deflation of depression.
6. Distractibility, easily diverted attention. This is not so much an attention

deficit problem as it is a life value, as in: don’t get stuck in what you’re
doing; move on, move up, move out, and if at first you don’t succeed,
don’t waste any more time on it. Anything worth doing is worth doing
57
fast. (Otherwise the profit margin evaporates.) The patience required

to attend to brokenness, sorrow, loss, injury, and to make beautiful
things last, is no longer a virtue in a world where everything is instantly
available and replaceable, like instant coffee, copies, replays, music,
and therapy. A former analysand of mine once said, sadly, “We don’t
take time for tragedy.” And we should consider that the shadow side
of short-term therapy is impatience, so that patients may be badly served
in the end. No time to linger, contemplate, wonder, fail, backtrack.
The soul now has “No Loitering” signs posted all over it.
7. Involvement in activities that are likely to have undesirable consequences.

Extensive credit buying, deficit spending, building oversized military
arsenals, an array of corporate mergers, buy-outs, takeovers, manic
escalation of greed and non-sustainable growth, are a few examples.
The basic themes in all these signs and symptoms are the qualities of
speed and large size. Mania is life in the fast lane, everything faster, bigger,
and therefore better.
Since we are still prejudiced in favor of the Hero, whose exploits on
the athletic field or battlefield are considered exemplary, we have tended to
see less pathology in mania, which is a kind of heroism, than in non-heroic,
“weak-minded” melancholia. Many people suffer from “bipolar disorder”
(manic-depression) and many suffer from “depression,” but few are diagnosed
as only manic, even when their appointment books are so filled they need
two or more of them and cannot drive ten minutes without using a cell
phone. In clinical books and manuals, “mania” without “depression” is
“rare,” as if mania alone is practically normal, and not of great clinical concern
because it suggests tireless, robust healthy-mindedness.
The manic attitude cannot tolerate slowness, weakness, heaviness,
gravity, and irony (the pause that reflects), and thus mania works against
maturation. As we have seen, most of psychology’s attention in the last two
hundred years has been paid to “depression” as pathological weakness
(neurasthenia, psychasthenia, weak nerve, weak psyche). Whether “weakness”
comes congenitally, through heredity, from the environment, or from failure
of morality, the idea of weakness itself evokes annoyance, irritability, or
58
downright hostility, so that even when we “treat” depressed persons with

compassion and concern, we treat the “depression,” as an invading entity,
with a militaristic attitude designed to defeat and exterminate it: with
weapons of anti-depressant drugs, electro-shock, attacks on “faulty cognitive
schemas.” We treat “depression” with might and mania.
If it is weakness that characterizes “depression,” then strength must
characterize health: energy, speed, alertness, “light” mood. This splitting into
sickness/health, weakness/strength, manic/depressive, has produced a
situation in which manic persons are those who live the collective criteria of
health to an extreme which does harm to themselves and their families, but
who also incite unconscious envy in those whose solid ties to reality and to
history do not allow them to fly so high. On the other hand, those diagnosed
as “depressed” live counter to the collective criteria of health, and so must
be psychologically “abnormal.” What sort of psychological revolution might
happen if the depressives amongst us were not considered to “have
depression” (like having a disease) nor be “abnormal” (like having three legs),
but rather as those who have a fundamentally different attitude toward life,
who are living from a different perspective on their experiences? By placing
such persons outside the realm of the “normal,” and regarding their depressed
states as pathological by definition, we not only betray a hidden contempt
disguised as care: we position them not just as patients, but as enemies of a
way of life.
59
CHAPTER FOUR
Hard Times for Melancholy

o doubt the first more-or-less conscious humanoid woke up with a
N headache, poor appetite, worry about the day’s dangers, lugging

around heavy thoughts of death and the meaning of life, while
rummaging for a clean pelt to wear and a couple of clubs for another grinding
day at the hunt. Not because of high carbon monoxide levels in his two-
story cave, not because she had an eating disorder, and not because he/she
suffered from low self-esteem, but because thoughts of death and the meaning
of life are heavy, because survival is hard, the hunt is grinding. Melancholy
and its symptoms have been with us always. It is as much a part of human
life as making love or making art, and as necessary to being completely
human as eating or calling in sick to work simply because you’d rather be
doing something else.
How has it come to pass that melancholy, that affliction once among
the most noble, and even royal, afflictions, is now a derivative of other, lesser,
newer syndromes? The old madness is now thought of as slinking into the
head as a secondary symptom resulting from some other “primary”
problem—childhood trauma, drinking, rejection in love, the vaguely
omnipresent danger of “low self-esteem.” We do not accept melancholy as
part of our natural being. Like death and old age, it is felt to be unnatural
and therefore avoidable.
It has even lost its name: melancholy is now “depression,” clinicalized,
pathologized, and undifferentiated from the blue “melancholia” formerly
recognized by poets, philosophers, blues singers and doctors alike, now
experienced as a “treatable illness” rather than as a difficult, often painful
affliction of the soul that is not an illness and doesn’t want “treatment.” (And
this is a good place to note that the word “treatment,” from the Latin tractare,
literally means “to haul” or “to drag.”)
If you see “depression” as a medical problem first and foremost, in
which case the cause must be a physical and organic one, then you expect it
to be treatable by those means. But since all of us are “depressed” at one time
or another, and many of us are “depressed” quite a bit of the time for good
reason, the medical view has little to say to those of us whose brains are quite
all right, thank you, and whose chemistry needs little or no improvement.
(And even if it did, not all of us want to give up our melancholia and go through
the personality change that would result.) In short, much of the ordinary
“depression” most of us experience is not medical and doesn’t need medical
intervention. As a psychological experience, however, psychological attendance
to it may be most beneficial. (And it might be useful to note here that psycho/
therapeia is a Greek compound word meaning “to care for or attend to soul.”
Modern trappings notwithstanding, we are in several ways more like
our cave ancestors than we care to know—the Neanderthals and Cro-
Magnons and maybe even the Homo erectus cousins of our extended family.
We in the modern world are modern only in some ways, and these do not
always reach the core of the “sapiens” part of Homo sapiens. (From the Latin
“sapience,” meaning “wisdom.” You have to wonder at the arrogance of a
species that would name itself after an attribute of God.) Having cellular
phones and being able to surf the Internet and riding golf carts instead of
walking an 18-hole course is only part of being modern. Being modern also
means not being old: not historically old, and not physically old. “Aged” in
our culture is a four-letter word guaranteed to make you depressed if you
are young enough to fear it and old enough to realize just how much there
is to be depressed about.
The human psyche has never been inclined to move very fast, even
when trying to escape getting old. No matter what momentous changes we
have wrought by force of intellect or war, by disciplined science or accidental
discoveries, the psyche, for all its amazing creativity, seems to have a hard
time keeping pace—especially as the pace accelerates. Psyche clings to its
old fantasies and ideas of how things should be, could be, were. It is no
accident that the favorite first words of any really great story are “Once upon
a time ....” These are the words that take us back in time, to beginnings, or
into pristine timelessness. The modern world, in its youthful newness, can
never be the melancholic soul’s first true home. It has too many gadgets. It
is a world in love with technology, while the imagination, the marvelous
64
HARD TIMES FOR MELANCHOLY
capacity of the soul to make images which become our reality, and which
ironically is thus also the mother of technology, is too often recognized at
best as whimsy, and dismissed at worst as “mere fantasy”.
The fact is human psychology doesn’t change fast, and a lot of us don’t
change well, or willingly. The more manic our society, the more depressed
we are. Of course, no one can keep up. As the Red Queen tells Alice in the
bizarre world of perverse logic known as Wonderland, “Now, here, you see,
it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want
to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”1 Only a
little way into this book, and already we are tired and worn out—and still
in the same place.
The theme of “speed” is a recurring subtext in this book. Not only is
it true that haste makes waste; haste is a curse laid on psyche, a cruel
taskmaster driving life ever faster, faster, right over the edge. How natural
that “speed” should also be one of our national drugs of choice. In a speed-
oriented culture like ours, ruled by the child archetype that keeps us believing
we must have instant gratification, haste lays waste the normal periodicities
and seasons of life, those slow-turning cycles necessary for maturation,
security, solidity, and lasting change.
We live in a world where speed is of the essence; in our hurry to get to the
better future, we prefer not to notice that the quick fix is no antidote for the slow
wound. In a world where everything must happen instantly—instant election
returns (accurate or not), instant replay, instant e-mail, instant Internet access—
anything that can be accelerated must be, since “slow” is a “symptom” and “faster”
means “health ”. No time for the wisdom of the song, “You need a lover with a
slow hand.” No wonder more and more of us are getting depressed in response
to this mad mania that passes for robust sanity.
“Depression,” when divorced from its historical and religious contexts,
is the poor cousin in the family of psychological afflictions. The profession of
psychology treats it as a serious problem but, oddly, not as a problem of depth,
and so it offers explanations for it but not a depth psychological understanding
of it. By taking the phenomenon of depression exclusively as an a-historical,
a-cultural, a-spiritual mental-only problem, to be solved by cognitive tampering
or a drug-fix, we simplify and thus degrade the affliction.
65
Consider an ad that appeared in the November/December 1996 issue

of Psychology Today, on one side of the page is a stylized drawing of a man’s
head with a firecracker exploding inside the skull. (Firecrackers exploding
inside heads should give us pause.) The copy reads:
GET UP AND GO with Life Extension Scientists Durk Pearson &

Sandy Shaw’s TURBO BLAST™ with antioxidant polyphenols.
What can a “Life Extension Scientist” be, other than a mad doctor from
a 1950’s science fiction movie? Do you know what “antioxidant polyphenols”
are? Sounds like a room freshener ingredient. Turbo Blast™, we are told, is
“a get up and go juice that puts you on the slower track to aging. Turbo
Blast™ is a delicious fruit flavored drink that features an extraordinarily
beneficial green tea extract.”
A “get up and go juice”? Taste aside, what’s wrong with Gatorade? Some
people get up and go on anything with caffeine in it. More telling is the ad’s
subtle ploy of calling this stuff “delicious”. Beware of any health product
that’s supposed to taste “delicious”. Then the ad goes on to explain that “a
particular class of antioxidant bioflavinoid compounds called polyphenols
have gained the attention of increasing numbers of cardiovascular disease
and cancer researchers.” (But maybe they have gained the interest of
researchers because the stuff is potentially lethal.) Then comes the best part:
And Turbo Blast™ is designed to give you a smooth mental lift

and give your brain the nutrients it can use to make
noradrenaline, which is the brain’s version of adrenaline—the
natural “get up and go juice”!
Oh, the excitement conveyed in that exclamation point! Just what I

needed, a mental lift—but from what? To where? We are encouraged here
to treat our brains like pets, giving them the nutrients they need—as if we
never eat actualfood—so they can get a lift, quite independently of the rest
of us. Then the ad names five great things the product does for you—all of
which can just as well be gained from a balanced diet, regular exercise, and
an occasional glass or two of good red wine. The ad is so manic you might
miss its greatest irony: it is selling something your brain already produces
naturally without outside help.
66
If you are one of those who like the idea of TurboBlast™, this book
you are now reading is not for you.
There are, or used to be, places in American life where melancholia
could live openly in an appreciated and artistic way—most expressively in
blues music. It is no accident that blues music came forth from the profound
loss and grief of black slaves in a white culture, and that it sang eloquently
of the quintessential human condition: love won, love lost, love betrayed,
sorrow, loneliness so great it could kill, dreams of better tomorrows, laments
for hope destroyed.
But it is hard to find blues music in the fabric of everyday American
life. Much easier to find commercial country music or various grades of “metal”
music on the radio. Blues music takes time, time to play or sing, time to listen
to. A good blues song should go on long enough to let you sink into it, wallow
awhile, surface very slowly and reluctantly. If you drift into Louis Armstrong’s
1928 version of “West End Blues” (by King Oliver), it will stop time, wrap
you around with every emotion you’ve ever had or are likely to, and carry you
for days in the softest, most bittersweet melancholy.
But who has time for blues music in the frenetic tempo of commuting
to work and shopping in malls? Even the words we use for musical “products”
have no feeling in them: the disks are all compact now, made small, very
different from the old shiny, fragile 78-rpm records and from the 33-rpm
vinyl “albums,” which sounded like a true collection of something you’d want
to keep, like a photo album of all the old faces and times and places. One
more loss to mourn.
F or the experience it describes, “depression” is a relatively recent word.

Before the twentieth century, “depression” was called by other names, and
though its symptoms have not changed in thousands of years, the significance
attached to them has varied greatly in different times and places. Once, as
“melancholia,” it was a concern of transformative alchemy, which tried to turn
the leaden condition into something golden; now as “depression” it is usually
reduced to literal chemistry. Once a spiritual affliction of mature minds, it is
now reduced to an inability to cope.
67
Rationales for treatments have not changed as much as we might think,

although some of the old remedies are now applied with more sophisticated
techniques—machines and electrodes have replaced the electric eels used by
the ancient Romans to shock people out of a depression, and magnetism
has returned to some psychiatric respectability (as a treatment now known
as “transcranial magnetic stimulation”) more than 200 years after Anton
Mesmer used magnets to treat “depression,” without knowing either the
principle behind it or the part of the body to stimulate. The new techniques
are wonderfully updated, but have not greatly advanced our psychological
understanding of what it is they are treating.
One of the most reliable methods of treatment in the ancient world
was an herbal remedy made from hellebore, which acted as a violent purge
to unclog the bowels. The therapeutic expectation was the same then as now:
to relieve the psychophysical “constipation” that often accompanied
melancholia and get life moving again. But one could argue that between
hellebore and electro-convulsive therapy, hellebore is the better remedy: for
while the former is a violent herb and may cause rectal bleeding, it relieves
the melancholy without (as ECT often does) disturbing the memory, that
faculty so vital to the life and health of the soul. Also, you wouldn’t want a
treatment that worked too quickly. Just think what might have happened if
the chronically melancholic Martin Luther had taken a fast-acting remedy
for his constipation (which afflicted him all his life). We might not have
had the Ninety-Five Theses and a Protestant Reformation. His melancholia
might have lasted only long enough for four or five theses—hardly enough
to reform anything.
The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used in American
psychiatry appeared relatively recently, in 1952, describing the
symptomatology of depression as an abnormal clinical condition. Of course
people got depressed before that, and felt miserable for years on end, and
tried all the remedies that unhappy souls had tried before them: herbal teas,
aphrodisiacs, positive thinking, change of diet, change of scene if they could
afford it, and sometimes just a plodding but functional resignation to
depressing reality. And sometimes, in extremis, they committed suicide.
68
The classification of “depression” as a “major mood disorder” (as it is

now designated in the fourth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual—DSM-IV, which lists its symptoms and rates its severity by
duration and quantity of symptoms) means that the phenomenon has been
extracted from a living context—the individual persons life—and made into
an entity. You can “look it up” to see if you “have it.” “Melancholia” is
included as a fifth-digit code number as a sub-classification of “Major
Depressive Episode” in the DSM-IV. This means that you can be depressed
with or without melancholia. In this kind of medical-diagnostic thinking,
“melancholia” describes a depression that has gotten “worse.” While its
symptomatology does add a certain precision and depth to a diagnosis of
“major depressive episode,” melancholia is not considered apart from “mental
disorder,” so that its other qualities, such as reflectiveness, slowness, and
sense of irony are not mentioned. It is considered in the DSM-IV only as a
sort of adjunct pathology to “depression,” which is given the greater
importance by the designation “major.”
In modern times, melancholia has been pathologized wrongly and put
in a wrong context. It has been medicalized, when it more properly belongs
in the category of “sicknesses” that afflict the soul and often the spirit, for
we find that melancholy does not necessarily impair cognitive or intellectual
ability at all, and in fact, this is one of its curses: one can think all too well,
too rationally, too reasonably, one can remember everything and reflect lucidly
upon it—and this is not a comfort. Our failure to understand the “pathology”
of melancholy is indicative of our modern failure to perceive psychological
phenomena within a psychological framework. The medical model is
inadequate for dealing with afflictions of the soul.
Extraction of “symptoms” from their psychic roots leaves the
psychological context behind while the symptoms are moved to the
foreground, taking priority. Melancholia has been cut loose from its deep
roots in psychic life, from nature, from political and social contexts, from
the context of an individual’s life, and has been standardized by symptom.
Thus “depression,” which literally means to press (or be pressed) down, oddly
enough has come to be thought of as a surface experience, a “problem” of the
conscious ego alone rather than of the soul in extremity.
69
Since we have little regard for the antiquity and depth of this affliction,
it is little wonder that there is a tendency to diagnose medical or psychiatric
“depression” in persons for whom our culture has no deep regard: it is no
accident, for example, that approximately seventy percent of Americans
diagnosed as depressed are women. Given our cultural bias against old people,
people of color, gay people, et al.—all of whom have good reason to be
depressed apart from personal pathology—there is cause to worry about how
many of these people are given psychiatric diagnoses for a condition that in
earlier times might have been called the better part of wisdom. And it is a
question, too, how many are diagnosed as “depressed” when the real problem
is one of outrage against injustice that has no avenue of expression, and how
many are given pacifying medications to reduce depressive anxiety that may
be pointing to legitimate fears: of poverty, of discrimination, of displacement,
of loss of love.
“Depression” as a mental health catchword is over-used, over
medicated, over-diagnosed, undervalued—a situation suggesting that it is a
phenomenon not well understood, and certainly not accepted. Just because
it is so “common,” we have developed little sense of noting the matter of
depression, so that we cannot be precise about “what is the matter” and are
unable to discriminate between all the possible shades of melancholia: blacks,
grays, somber violets, all the blues. In keeping with the general grandiosity
of American life, affects have to be “major.”
It was recognized by the ancients that mania is the shadow of
“depression,” just as “depression” is the shadow of mania. They go together,
as in the disorder known to modern psychiatry as manic-depression, and even
more recently as bipolar disorder. Psychologically, this bipolarity is more than
a physical chemical imbalance; it is a profound metaphor for psyche’s need
to be grounded and rooted in earthly matter as well as to taste the euphoria
of limitless flight.
But in the last and now present century, in America particularly, we
have come to imagine that health is to be found only on one side, in the
limitless flight, the euphoric, progressive, upward-onward-forward
movement, and that qualities which do not serve this movement—slowness,
grief, irony, reflection, introversion, a love of history—must belong in the
70
slag heap of pathology. We have made this one-sidedness the norm, equating
symptoms of mania with signs of health—a highly suspect equation. When
an individual uncontrollably spends wildly with a credit card, that is clearly
a symptom of destructive manic behavior; but when a government spends
wildly on militant nationalism, this behavior is understood as self-protective
and even conducive to economic growth.
The medical model of “depression” has left us with only a dried residue
of a psychological condition that once had great implications. The psycho-
theological model, rooted in Christian humanism, has left us saddled with
the happy, sanguine ego-psychology of a new age. In this fantasy of psychic
health, there is no time or use for “negative” thoughts and emotions, which
are to be replaced with good feelings about oneself, emotional comfort,
optimism, self-control. Have a nice but not too ecstatic day.
Clearly, the romance has gone out of melancholy in our time. We don’t
have unrequited love, we have co-dependency. We don’t have deep longings,
we have addictions. We don’t realize tragedy in our lives, we merely regret
poor choices. Most of our great passions have become disorders.
In the ancient Western world, the melancholic person was thought to
be “touched with genius,” marked for greatness, endowed with artistic gifts
and exceptional capacities for leadership (notwithstanding tendencies to
irritability, constipation, and sullen fits). But now, without distinguishing
the difference between depression and melancholy, huge HMOs (health
maintenance organizations) and hospitals (corporate conglomerations of the
“health care industry”) put up billboards and show television commercials
persuading us that “depression” is a “disease.” Melancholy is merely a
symptom of this disease, and if you “have it,” it can kill you by driving you
to suicide—something you would “have no reason” to do if you didn’t have
this disease. The search for meaning has been replaced with the procedure
for cure.
My melancholic temperament makes me stubbornly refuse to leap onto
the giddy carousel of “mental health,” with its deathless painted horses and
promises of gold rings. It has taken me more than half a lifetime to appreciate
melancholy, this view of the world seen through a blue haze. Whatever I
accomplished in my first fifty years I did in spite of chronic melancholia; but
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whatever I accomplish for the rest will be because of it. Saturn, the great
cumbersome God who is father of melancholia, eventually, in his own slow
time, gives all his great riches to his children through his daughter, the Blue
Lady, and I am one such heir. If the affliction of my soul merits nothing
greater than a tiny anti-depressant pill, I would have to believe that my soul’s
suffering is ephemeral and probably without meaning. But I believe the pen
is mightier than the pill, and if I didn’t, I would have checked out years ago.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Old Theory for a New Age: The Humors

(Embellished by the Author)
A wise man should consider that health is the

greatest of human blessings, and learn how
by his own thought to derive benefit from his
illnesses.
—Hippocrates, Regimen of Health

SCENE: Dr. Burtons garden, late morning
t the eleventh hour in the morning, Dr. Burton puts aside the book
A he has been reading, takes off his spectacles and rubs his tired eyes.
He shakes his head, once again not understanding himself. He
should never read Mr. Shakespeare’s King Lear when he has just been visiting
with Dame Melancholy. He has told himself this as often as he has read King
Lear, which is more often than he can remember, because he loves this dark
tale. The Blue Lady has only just left hours earlier, saying she would be back
at twilight. Then he had lost himself in Lear’s world and it was as if she were
as close as his skin. What frightens him even more than her ghostly sad
presence is how deeply, how intimately, he understands Lear.
The sky is soft gray, protected by a cloudy film. He thinks it might
rain later that night. The air is surprisingly cool, and this he enjoys, because
summer heat tires him and frays his nerves. He goes out to the little patch
of garden he keeps, thinking he should tend the flowers. It makes him feel
virtuous to do this, because the flowers are so fragile and so dependent on
him. But he does not really like to garden, even though he is English. He
has never told anyone that he does not like to garden, as if this fact would
reveal something perverse in him.
Barely ten minutes have passed before Dr. Burton finds himself relaxing
into a rare state of sanguine pleasure. He is not remembering, nor is he
anticipating the future. It is not the moral act of gardening that does this,
not the virtue of tending helpless flowers, not the beauty of the flowers
themselves, although he appreciates their beauty very much. It is the dirt
that brings him such pleasure, the cool, slightly damp, almost black, pungent
dirt. He loves the feel of it on his hands, likes to sift through it like the fine
flour he buys from the miller. It is so much purer than he is. He tries not to
disrupt the lives of the insects who live beneath the flowers, not because he
is sentimental or squeamish, but because the little world of the insects and
flowers is the only kind of perfectly harmonious existence he knows.
Sitting on the friendly ground, removing growth so that the flowers
can breathe, Dr. Burton almost forgets himself and begins to feel something
that might be happiness. His blood feels warm. He feels a bit younger, lighter.
For a moment, even the whole world feels relaxed, sanguine, as if he has left
behind his natural melancholic temperament and become some new, almost-
cheerful man. Or perhaps it is a moment of optimism, that there is another
world than Lear’s. Yes, of course, there is another world than Lear’s! He is
not Lear! How easily he falls into the Blue Lady’s mood when she comes to
him. And he thinks, with great compassion, that old King Lear perhaps could
have spared himself much anguish had he only spent a little time now and
then in a small flower garden.
How little is required for happiness, Dr. Burton thinks and talks quietly
to himself. But how difficult it is to gain so little, how impossible to hold
onto, to stay in such a sanguine state. I spend months tending flowers that
die in days. Well. Best not to focus on the flowers; better to contemplate the
lovely sensation of the dirt on my hands.
He loses track of time and does not care. He begins to hum an old
child’s evening song his mother used to sing to him, although he cannot
remember any of the words. Then he laughs suddenly, seeing himself as if
in a cosmic mirror, sitting on the ground, saving himself from sorrow by
playing with dirt.
Author’s Commentary
he ancient Greek medical idea of the humors, or fluids, of the human
T body originated in a view of the world that did not completely divorce
matter from psyche, body from soul. For more than seventeen centuries, this
conception of health and illness through the quality of humors provided the
Western world with one of the earliest, and remarkably psychologically
accurate, typological models for differentiating and understanding individual
characteristics and pathologies.
The humoral theory as metaphor provides a language, a manner of
speaking, that is as accurate in its own way as is modern medical terminology.
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OLD THEORY FOR A NEW AGE: THE HUMORS
The humoral theory, when not taken literally, is a medical system of

observation, concerned with temperature, color, timing, heat, and also the
movement of the stars, those archetypal psychic patterns that give us our
basic forms.
The four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) were
conceived in terms of correspondences: they correspond to the cosmic
elements (air, water, fire and earth) and divisions of time (especially the
seasons), and they govern human behavior. The humors were thought to
have roughly the influence we now attribute to genes.
The idea that matter and psyche are distinct but not separate from each
other makes it possible to read the condition of the psyche in the body; and,
as the ancient physicians knew, you could treat the sick psyche by treating
the physical body. Dreams, for example, used diagnostically, would show
what was going on in one’s body, and the body, through its symptoms and
behavior, spoke loudly and insistently about the soul’s condition. Diagnosis
of dreams and symptoms was a discipline; interpretation of these phenomena
was an art.
The Humors
The ancients thought that individual personality was formed from two
primary sources: inheritance from parents, and the influence of the stars.
These two sources produced the various proportions of humoral
combinations that determined individual temperament and character. The
four humors were also known by the Caucasian Greeks as the four
“complexions,” owing to their manifestation in skin tones: the sanguine’s
ruddiness, the choleric’s jaundiced look, the paleness of the phlegmatic, and
the dark complexion of the melancholic.
Here are the correspondences and descriptions of humoral
temperaments, in brief. It should be noted, with pleasure, that none are cast
in moralistic positive/negative terms. They are descriptions, not judgments.
Temperament: Sanguine
Humor: Blood (from the heart)
Quality: Warm and moist, red, sweet, temperate
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Season: Spring
Characteristics: Ruddy, cheerful, hopeful, confident, enthusiastic, animated,
lively, spirited, bloodthirsty. In alchemy, “sanguine” signifies a reddish-purple
tincture, and the appearance of this tincture signifies the culmination of the
work of transformation, the appearance of the Philosopher’s Stone, the elixir
of life. From earliest times, the sanguine temperament was most valued and
desired. It is the humor opposed to melancholy. Sanguine persons tend to
have a reddish or ruddy complexion. Probably the best known sanguine
personality is Santa Claus.
Temperament: Melancholic
Humor: Black bile (from the spleen)
Quality: Cold and dry, thick, sour, black
Season: Autumn
Characteristics: Gloomy, sad, despondent, serious, pensive, sorrowful,
thoughtful, hypochondriacal. Melancholia corresponds to the “nigredo” stage
in alchemical work (when substances darken or turn black) and to the
substance of lead, and from earliest times was thought to be the most
passionate, malignant, dangerous, and difficult of temperaments.
Melancholic persons tend to have dark complexions. Ebenezer Scrooge had
a melancholic temperament, but so did Abraham Lincoln, eloquent, quietly
passionate, a mournful man in a sorrowful time.
Temperament: Choleric
Humor: Yellow bile (from the liver)
Quality. Warm and dry, bitter
Season: Summer
Characteristics: Bilious, angry, testy, irritable, impatient, touchy. Most
contrary to the phlegmatic humor. In alchemy, this humor corresponds to
sulphur, an extremely active substance which may on the one hand produce
enormous vitality and lust for life, and on the other hand is dangerous and
difficult to control owing to its volatile combustibility. Choleric persons tend
to have a jaundiced complexion. All bad guys in old movies have bilious
temperaments.
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Temperament: Phlegmatic
Humor: Phlegm (from the brain)
Quality: Cold and moist
Season: Winter
Characteristics: Sluggish, not easily excited either to action or display of
emotion; cool, calm, placid, dull, stoical. Alchemically, this humor is close
to water, owing to its relative colorlessness, but it also corresponds to a
condition of reduced heat in which things may be coagulated, congealed,
or otherwise made to move slowly. Phlegmatic persons tend to have pale
complexions. Most nineteenth-century English butlers in movies have
phlegmatic temperaments.
ike us, the Greeks had their prejudices. In the doctrine of humors, blood
L was considered the best part of the human body, the noblest element,
the most essential substance. It was wonderful stuff, and though you could
get sick from having too much of it, it was such a fine humor that, unlike
money, it wasn’t needed in excessive amounts for good health. The body’s
health was determined by the quality, not the quantity, of all its humors,
but blood had exceptional quality.
Blood could, like any humor, cause illness, usually of an acute sort, as
could yellow bile. The cold humors of black bile and phlegm tended to
produce chronic rather than acute illnesses. But whereas the other three
humors were looked on as potentially morbid—illnesses waiting to happen—
blood was considered actualized health. In their book Saturn and Melancholy,
Panofsky et al.1 point out that the Greeks did not even have an adjective to
describe that constitution determined by the blood (“sanguine”) because it
was normative and basic: it was the point of reference. So even if there was
an excess of blood, it was not possible to make a diagnosis of pathology on
the basis of quantity alone; something had to happen to the blood to turn it
into a pathological agent.
Black bile had always been regarded as the direct opposite of the
desirable normalcy of blood. Though not inherently pathogenic in itself, it
still suggested a “tainted” disposition, a temperament having an ultra-
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sensitive potential for pathology, like a dormant bad seed, ready to become
actual illness at any time. Its “blackness” was the becoming-morbid condition
of yellow bile or phlegm or blood.
Because of its difficult and often painful features, melancholy, recognized
from earliest times as a physical as well as “temperamental” illness, more than
any other humor gave impetus to the development of the idea of humors as
the basis of character types. Paradoxically, it was the one humor that provided
the clearest differentiation between what was illness and what was character
type. The characteristics of melancholy, the wide range of symptoms it
produces (fear, depression, lethargy, and excessive sadness being most
common—but also forms of “fury” or mania), could become so pronounced
and so frightening that these very symptoms came to be looked upon as
character traits in those individuals whose predominant humor was black bile.
And yet these symptoms were also psychological. That is, the black
bile could cause mental changes without necessarily making the person
physically ill. In short, melancholia was a “mental illness” much more so
than other humoral pathologies; and this recognition helped shift the early
emphasis from regarding it as a purely physiological illness to treating it as
an equally serious psychological disturbance. Melancholia is a true
psychosomatic condition: a psychological illness with a physiological
(humoral) origin, and at the same time a physical illness with a psychological
(temperamental) origin. Two sides, same coin.
The humors still appear as metaphors in modern dreams: in colors
perhaps most obviously—blood red, bilious yellow, depressed black, and the
undramatic sepia of phlegm. And sometimes these humors, each of which
each person has more or less, appear personified in art (film, literature, drama)
in their classic, even stereotypical, portrayals: the jolly sanguine figure (who
may also appear maniacal); the sluggish, slow, faded-out phlegmatic figure
who plods dully (but may also be unflappable and reliable); the hot-tempered
jaundiced bigot, full of blustery bile (who yet has a powerful, fascinating
energy); and of course the scowling suspicious-looking, academically cold-
hearted melancholic (who is yet passionate and brilliant).
Any competent old Greek doctor could tell us that melancholy is both
a concrete, substantial condition located in the body, and simultaneously a
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metaphorical condition of the psyche. Further, that doctor knew perfectly

well that there is, literally, no black bile in the body (although bile may turn
dark, more brown than yellow). The ancients must have had a metaphorical
understanding of the medical arts, since it is most unlikely that Greek
physicians thought they were really seeing black bile: this would mean there
was an unbelievably high number of color-blind doctors in ancient Greece.
“Black bile,” then, is an imaginal or psychological condition of yellow
bile. Something psychological has happened to turn yellow bile “black.” It
is an image of dark mood eclipsing lightness of mind. In modern terms,
this is close to the idea that “depression” is anger turned inward. The
biliousness, or anger, is not moving outward but goes inward and downward,
to the bowels, where it coagulates and constipates and makes both mind
and body dark and heavy with shit. To say someone is melancholic is the
same as saying someone has a lot of black bile, the first reflecting the
psychological reality, the second reflecting the physical reality. If we note
here that the word for “anger” in Greek is cholos, and the word for bile is
chole, the relationship becomes clearer: to be full of bile, or have bile, or be
bilious, is to be irritable, peevish, cranky. And to have black bile is to be
very angry and have an ungovernable temper, or a temperament prone to
fits, tantrums, and dark moods.
One of the values of the humoral theory for a depth psychology of
melancholy is that the theory keeps us in good humor and keeps humor in
the psyche. This is not a mere laughter-is-the-best-medicine idea. It means
that the wetness of “humor,” whether as joke or physical fluid, is able to keep
the soul from drying up, from becoming shriveled or too fixed in arid ways
of being. To look at psyche from the humoral perspective is to see it as
constantly in a state of flux, forming itself and then dissolving the form. To
humor psyche is to moisten it, loosen it through wetting to help it get unstuck,
which is why the bitter tears of melancholy and grief are so important, because
they help dissolve the fixedness and stoppage ofwhat we now call “depression.”
And of course, one needs a sense of humor for this: the sense of humor is
what adds moisture to the soul. “Dry” humor also is needed in its turn:
sarcasm, irony, biting wit, may help dry out a soul flooded with tears or one
constantly “pissed off” with angry streaming yellow bile.
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All liquids tend to erode and eventually dissolve solid structures,

some more quickly than others—especially if the liquid is acidic and
corrosive, like bile. And here too is one of the values of melancholy: it
eats through whatever concretisms we have become trapped in, corrodes
our habitual ways of looking at the world and ourselves in it, dissolves
old prejudices, delusions and illusions, to give us a new image of reality—
even if it is from the unlovely underside. This is also what good comedians
do for us, when their humor is sharp and pointed, and we laugh when
we recognize the truth in the joke. It is not a coincidence that so many
first-rate comedians have melancholic temperaments, and that they often
are gifted in playing tragic characters on stage and screen.
That which moves you to laugh, to flex the muscles of your body, is
what gets psyche moving and flexible again, puts it into flux, makes it flow.
We all know how a well-placed joke can dissolve tension and release psyche
from a rigid fixation or tense fearfulness. It doesn’t necessarily solve or resolve
anything; it dissolves. Laughter is restorative because at the heart of the best
comedy is tragedy. This is why the comedy films of Charlie Chaplin so
captured the imagination and then the collective broken heart of a nation
in the misery of the Great Depression: his characters were figures of deep
pathos whose circumstances and actions were portrayed as inherently, not
extraneously, funny. One laughed naturally with them and for them, but
not at them. And so Chaplin took us to the heart of melancholic “humor,”
and those who saw the human condition on the screen through his eyes came
away a bit more heartened, even if the smiles were a little sad and faded all
too soon.
Being Cool
Since black bile was one of four normal humors of the body, something
had to happen to it in order for it to become pathological. If we perceive the
characteristics of the normal melancholic temperament as symptoms of
“depressive illness,” we have missed the metaphor, the archetypal dimension,
the connection to the soul’s depth. We have, in fact, missed exactly the point
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the Greeks saw clearly: that melancholy was a “normal” condition—a

difficult, often painful, but still normal temperament.
But there was a danger, of course. Given the potential malignancy of
black bile and its tendency to produce moodiness, anxiety, sorrow, and
obsessive thinking, the dangerous aspect of black bile lay in its capacity to
upset one’s usual functioning, or to distort one’s character. Black bile itself
was simply part of ordinary physiology; it was what black bile could do to
wreck the system when it went “wrong” that was of medical concern. Things
go wrong when the black bile produces a change in another humor—darkens
and “corrupts” the blood or phlegm or yellow bile and turns them “black.”
So a severe state of melancholia (what moderns call “depression”) is
“caused” by, and consists of, something gone wrong in another humor, a
wrong transformation in the psyche. While not pathological in itself, black
bile may have a pathological effect on any other humor, primarily on account
of its heat. Black bile is “cold and dry” in its normal state, but it becomes
“hot” when it goes “wrong.”
In the humoral theory, as in alchemy, the principal factor is heat. Heat
is a quality in itself and an agent that produces transformation. All cooks
know the importance of heat to produce transformations in the kitchen, and
all good cooks know how to regulate it. Toast, for example, is not hard to
make if you have bread and a toaster, but if you have to make it over an
open fire (or have a feral toaster that obeys no operating instructions), you
have to know exactly how to regulate and distribute the heat to get the bread
to toast and not burn.
Too much “heat” in the body burns the yellow bile, or sometimes the
blood, and turns it “black.” The effect of this “burning” is to drive you half-
or completely mad, to cast your mind into darkness. Turn up the heat and
your everyday, comfortable level of consciousness turns impenetrably black.
Good judgment may cloud or darken when the heat is on. Aristotle noted
that it is heat, among other things, which causes wine and melancholy to
have similar effects: wine “excites the heat of the blood,” as Melancthon put
it,2 and an excess of overheated black bile poisons the melancholic.
One of the problems our modern culture has with “depression” is the
same problem it has with “heat”: we are afraid of it. Not the heat of body
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temperature or baking recipes, but the heat of passion—intellectual

intensity, heated debates which create friction, sweating through or
stewing about a creative but slow-burning project or torturous dilemma,
letting someone simmer; in short, whenever and wherever we are not cool.
Like the clients they serve, too many modern psychologists are frightened
of heat, and I do not mean the kind they try to escape by going on vacation
in August.
Most of the characteristics that signify the presence of heat in the psyche
are now suspect as psychopathologies. It has become almost impossible to
tell the difference between a state of hot passionate conviction and a state of
pathological (heated) agitation. Gone are the old days when Peggy Lee could
get your blood hot singing “Fever!—in the morning, fever all through the
night,” and Elvis Presley could pant, “I’m just a hunk, a hunk of burnin’
love,” and no one considered that dependency, addiction, or obsession, except
worried parents who, being square, lost their cool. In those days, the antidotes
to heat were Perry Como and Pat Boone.
Although its meaning has changed somewhat over the decades, being
“cool” has always had its appeal. Patricia Berry does a wonderful jazz-like
riff on “cool” in her essay, “Image in Motion,” on “how movies think.” If
you read this quotation aloud, quickly, much as a slam poet would do it,
you get a real feel for “cool”:
Nowadays movies think COOL. Not cool as the word used to mean
in hippie or the pre-hippy days of beatniks and cool jazz (gentle,
progressive). In the late ’60s cool meant marijuana mellow, calm,
detached. ... Now cool means anything from novel, “with it,” to
simply “I like it.” Cool is not disinterested and not calm. Cool can
be brains splattered all over the inside of a car, Pulp Fiction cool.
Cool keeps its cool so long as it is ironic and self-reflexive. Cool is
self-conscious; cool looks at itself; cool does not take itself at face
value or seriously—much. Cool is a step removed; cool is a camera
looking. With cool, film is, like, “in.”3
Obsessive thinking generates heat in the mind, but it may also lead
to remarkable results: remember Michelangelo, melancholic par excellence,
who went for days and weeks and months obsessed with carving the image
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out of the marble, unable to sleep, not interested in food, forgetful of friends.
The image, only the image. He was not so much driven from behind by
demons from his past as he was pulled toward the stone by the image trapped
within it. Agitated, obsessive, unconcerned about “comfort” and “safety,” his
body congested with the dry powder of stone, he was a man on fire.
What would a conventional contemporary psychotherapist tell
Michelangelo? That he “needs” a safe, healthful working environment? That
he is driven by guilt and rage because his father was a lout? That he can
“take control of his life” and “choose” to “let go” of those obsessions that
have destroyed his social life and are making him gloomy and irritable? That
he needs a bath? That he “needs to work on” his mother complex so he’ll be
able to have a “normal” heterosexual relationship? That he ought to “risk
sharing his feelings” with a real person instead of a block of marble? Modern
advice would tell him he ought to cool it, get real, get laid, and get a life.
Humoral “Syndromes"
No matter what your temperament, you may become “tainted” or

“touched” with the melancholy humor; it is, after all, one of the humors
which are the natural constituent elements of human being, corresponding
to the four elements of which the world is made, fluid stuff which, like
dreams, we are made of. Humor is what “human” is composed of, along with
soil, as the Latin root of the English word “human” {humus, meaning “earth”)
shows. To be human is to be and have humor, in all senses of the word.
An excess of black bile—melancholia—was sufficient in itself to
produce a pathological condition. But the black bile was often mixed with
the other humors to produce what we might call humoral syndromes, all
of them “tainted” with melancholia, all of them having melancholic
features, but expressed in the habitual style of that predominant humor,
that temperament.
A normal or moderate amount of black bile was nothing to worry
about; but “melancholia adusta” (“dried”) was originally yellow bile gone
bad: darkened or burned through too much heat. So, “melancholia adusta”
could afflict a person of any temperament, signifying a drying up of the
imagination, of hope, of pleasure; or the burning passion that torments, like
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sexual lust or alcohol (which “evaporates” quickly and leaves one drier than
ever, the thirst never quenched); or the poem that compels its writing. Or it
meant a darkening of consciousness, an inability to see one’s way ahead or
inward, an eclipse of usual consciousness so that it becomes necessary to grope
your way into some new way of understanding things because the old way
doesn’t work any more.
The phlegmatic melancholic is characterized by a kind of bloated,
water-retentive inertia and the desire to sleep a lot. Many persons hospitalized
for depression in psychiatric units sleep too much, but it is not always clear
if this is because they are naturally phlegmatic in temperament or because
they are drugged. Either way, the staff tries to engage them in “socializing”
activities, even though most of these activities would cause even a hyperactive
ten-year-old to fall asleep.
The inertia of phlegmatic melancholy can be maddening to those
actively carrying on their daily lives, but I have found that often the inertia
signifies a necessary slowing of the organism, which, not only for phlegmatics,
is a natural and healthy condition. Perhaps they are the wise ones, reminding
us, as we rush into the future, that “slow” is valuable and necessary in the
formation of mountains and weathering of rocks, for turning the color of
leaves, for the ripening of tomatoes and corn, for the fermentation of wine.
Phlegmatic melancholics are usually not found tearing around town above
speed limit wielding cell phones. And since the phlegmatic temperament is
most often associated with old age, our culture’s impatience with and fear
of anything “old” adds to the aspersions and perception of “pathology” cast
upon persons of this temperament. They are washed up. The eighty-year-
old, barely visible behind the steering-wheel of an oil-tanker-sized Buick,
driving on a single-lane road at twenty miles an hour in a forty-mile-per-
hour zone, easily incites acts of violence, as do people who wait until their
groceries are completely through the check-out before they even start looking
for their checkbook.
Many temperamentally phlegmatic patients of any age in psychiatric
hospitals suffer the full range of symptoms associated with “depression,” but
are rarely allowed to, or are rarely helped to, understand these symptoms as
symptoms. They are usually provided with anti-depressants, or given
86
electroconvulsive “treatment,” or forced to play ridiculous games and roles

to demonstrate to hospital staff that they are “functional,” “socially
adaptive,” and are behaving “appropriately” in order to get released. It is
often precisely these stupidities that bring them to the hospital in the
first place; they are merely relocated with their affliction.
The phlegmatic melancholic is especially lacking a complementary
quantity and quality of heat, so that the water never evaporates, the body
(the physical locus of melancholy) never lightens or changes. Most necessary
in these circumstances is to generate heat in this person, to locate and ignite
the original source of passion and even rage—to get the water boiling, to
get steamed up. She need not drown in endless tears of self-pity and infantile
dependence. It is not the “clinical depression” that needs treatment; it is the
erotic flame that needs rekindling, the rage to live, and the passion and lust
for—not merely “change”—but transformation. This is what acute
phlegmatic melancholia requires. No pill will do the trick.
The choleric melancholic appears quite the opposite of the phlegmatic
temperament. The presence of bitter yellow bile, along with a
disproportionate quantity of blackened bile, forces these persons to rage in
despair. The afflicted ones present a wild, tormented visage and are pursued
by maniacal furies. They do not brood; they erupt. This is the condition
described today as “agitated depression.” The agitation is often associated,
by the whole pantheon of mental health workers (psychiatrists, social workers,
psychological testers, psychiatric nurses, psychologists), with violence in the
most literal way. Thus, the agitated person appears to be either suicidal
(usually if female) or murderous (usually if male) or both. Professionals
dealing with such persons usually react with as much fear as genuine concern,
so that the first need is perceived to be to “cool down” the agitated one.
One of the truly depressing aspects of this sort of melancholy is that
those who suffer from it frequently have legitimate cause to rant and rave;
they have been pushed to an extreme, often by forces beyond their control.
Their demands for attention and refusal to be comforted (bought) and
perception of injustice are not always or necessarily the infantile whinings
of weak dependents, nor the narcissistic passive-aggressive maneuvers of
the hopelessly hysterical. Actually, this condition of choleric melancholia may
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be a move toward health with a good prognosis, for there is already an ignition
of the organism’s self-protective instincts, already a heat-producing condition.
These are often but not always women who are just becoming conscious that
they have been ripped off by collective practices that have reduced them to
poverty (of both money and opportunity and genuine freedom), victimized
them for their sex, and condemned them to an absolute, not relative, second
place. The furies that pursue them are ancestral matrilineal ghosts, demanding
release and recognition, decent housing in the psyche as legitimate residents,
insisting on entirely new values and perceptions of how things are, and
pointing with furious desperation to a new direction that life must take if
one is to live at all.
Most important for the choleric melancholic is to gain the perception
that makes it possible to transform blind necessity into Fate. But far too
often, there are few viable options presented to such people. Their
“recovery” is thought to lie in a “better” self-image, an increase in “self-
esteem,” and a “more appropriate” adaptation to those very conditions
that most likely made them ill. These persons are released from hospital
or a short course of psychotherapy, but not always from their “depression.”
They leave “treatment” at some point, but take their “depression” with
them, with or without helping drugs. Too often the only change that takes
place is that they become docile, passionless statistics of treatment failure
as they return again and again for more therapy, more shock, more drugs,
more “professional help.”
Since this temperament has been associated with adolescence because
of its volatility (as the phlegmatic temperament is associated with old age
because of its slowness), our culture tends to dismiss it as infantile, especially
in females. An infantile temper tantrum thrown by a woman of any age is
still an infantile temper tantrum, which is what a lot of her choleric raging
looks like to those who diagnose or live with her. Women who get mad and
yell and stomp around demanding help with and food for their children, or
access to abortion clinics, certainly do look agitated, from which some sort
of “emotional disturbance,” “illness,” or “depression” (from guilt) may be
too quickly inferred. It begins in youth and adolescence, sometimes as
resistance to convention and conformity, and particularly in young females
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as a refusal to be made over in the trappings of an adult woman: sexual

availability to men, size six dresses (smaller is better), feet-wrecking shoes,
endurance of male inanities which permeate her life in everything from right
wing political pronouncements to the sexual preoccupations of corporate
managers, military men, basketball players and priests, among others.
How can a woman, at fifteen or twenty-five or forty, not be depressed?
Why do we not applaud her agitation? Why do we forget that the term
“agitator” was used not too long ago to describe people who had a political
agenda that threatened to undo the status quo? Why should we not encourage
young women to seize on that term and be agitated with pride? “Causes”
not only precipitate “depression”; they are also worthwhile values about
which one should be stirred up. If we could begin to consider that agitation
is one of the antidotes to depression, we might do a great service to psyche,
and to the choleric melancholics whose heat and passion help fuel our culture.
This heat can ignite and sustain any creative endeavor, for such creative work
requires that the heat and agitation not be diminished, but focused. It is
the difference between an out-of-control fire burning down a house and a
gas stove with controlled flame with which one can cook.4
In men who are of choleric temperament, melancholy tends to take a
violent course. To what extent this is because our culture expects violence
from men, and to what extent men are “naturally” inclined to “act out” their
hostility in violent ways, I don’t know. It does seem obvious, however, that
culture encourages whatever violent inclination is there, and often rewards
men for it by glorifying violent activities (war, sexual dominance in all forms,
hockey, cutthroat business practices).
It has become a psychotherapeutic cliche that inside every violent man
is an abused boy, and that behind the overt violence is depression, confusion,
pain, loneliness, and insecurity (all those things that women feel without the
expectation of becoming angry or violent). But merely stating the situation
does not change it. Even if the assumption is true, it fails to recognize the
mythic dimension of the cycle of violence: for here again is Chronos
attacking, replacing his father, and attempting to kill his own son (Zeus),
who then rises up in his turn with the same violence, attacks and replaces
Chronos. No wonder fathers are fearful and insecure; no wonder sons are
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wounded and confused. So long as the deeper archetypal dimension of the

violent cycle remains unconscious, the mythic tale will continue to play itself
out in each generation, on the collective as well as the personal level. In the
mythic drama being unconsciously enacted in individual households and
national governments, the main difference is size. The professional practice
of psychology, following a Western ideology that locates all pathology in
individuals, has become ideologically and pathologically obsessed with
repairing individual cogs instead of dismantling the crazy machine.
The sanguine melancholic may be just as “agitated” as the choleric type,
but it seems to me that a sanguineous or hot-blooded melancholy tends to
focus almost exclusively on sexual and erotic matters. Either the blood boils
from unsatisfied desire, or black bile has so cooled desire that erotic interest
has all but disappeared. Lust has cooled; one is not in heat. Cool melancholy
tends to work against warm Eros; one does not want to be “related” or turned
on erotically when one is in the pits.
At the same time, the absence of Eros is often what makes this type of
melancholy so painful and intolerable, as it increases and deepens the sense
of isolation and loneliness. Both men and women go through tortured
scenarios of approach/retreat, worry about rejection, insecurity over physical
appearance, and fear of anything having to do with sex as well as fear of not
having any sex to be afraid of. On one level, then, you can be melancholic
because you don’t have much or any sex life, and you worry about how to
attract and keep a sexual partner. Fortunately, you can find hundreds of how
to books on sexual health, or have a few sessions with a sex therapist, or try
interpersonal counseling to get you over the hump (sorry) and into life again.
The deeper levels have to do with more than a consideration of one’s own
sexuality and one’s interior attitude toward Eros; they involve a reappraisal
of culturally established and socially maintained sex roles; of old religiously
defined vices and virtues concerning sex, the body, and dirt; of being single
as abnormal; and of historically conditioned thinking that separates politics
and power from love and intimacy, the sacred from the secular, the aberrant
and deviant from the straight and exceedingly narrow range of possibilities.
Finally, there is the natural melancholic, whose melancholy comes by
nature, characterized by sadness, too much thought, fear of people, and a
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“corrupt” or disturbed imagination, as an old text has it. This is the affliction
of the melancholic temperament in which nothing in particular has to happen
to another humor to create the condition. It is the temperament marked by
an ascendancy or dominance of the qualities of black bile: a tendency to
irritability, a preoccupation with sorrow and grief, a most serious mien, and
frequently an odd sort of genius for suffering and brilliance in the arts,
statecraft, or religion. We will return later to the idea of a “corrupt”
imagination, or, as it manifests clinically, an impoverished imagination. This
is, after all, the essence of any “depression,” and yet it receives the least, if
any, attention.
Seasons ofAge
The humors also characterized the life-cycle (the “four ages” of life),
which could have different starting points: in one arrangement the cycle
begins with phlegmatic childhood, sanguine youth, choleric prime,
melancholic old age, and then perhaps a return to beginnings in a phlegmatic
second childhood. In another arrangement, the cycle could run from sanguine
carefree youth, through a choleric period from roaring twenties through
yuppie thirties and a melancholic period from mid-life-crisis-ridden forty
to sixty-five, to phlegmatic old age.
The humor of each of the four ages is in ascendancy as it becomes
necessary to complete each phase, according to the humoral theory. If this
did not happen, the ancients would suspect you had a humoral imbalance;
Jung would posit a condition of neurosis, or one-sidedness. But neither the
four cycles of life nor the pathologies thereof are to be taken literally: black
bile is imaginal, and so is a chronological division of life.
Seasons ofNature
Different humors within the individual gained influence by season: you

would be more hopeful and cheerful in the spring, irritable and edgy in the
long, hot summer, melancholic in the fall as dusk comes sooner, and phlegmatic
and sluggish in the winter. But this would only be possible if you were perfecdy
balanced in your humors, an ideal situation that cannot be realized.
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In humoral terms, you feel psychologically best when you are “in season,”
like ripe fruit: the sanguine person comes alive in spring but “falls” low in
autumn. The melancholic feels most vital and productive in autumn, when
the “black bile” is in the ascendant, but spring is inimical to black bile and
therefore depressing. To everything there is a season, says Ecclesiastes.
The “modern” syndrome of “Seasonal Affective Disorder” was known,
in its original form, not as a disorder but as a natural consequence of humoral
endowment. Temperamentally sanguine people, for example, are supposed
to feel depressed and tired as autumn approaches; they are in the down cycle
of their year. One of the problems resulting from our modern devaluation
of “depression” is that those with a melancholic temperament think they
are not supposed to feel depressed in spring or summer, when, in fact, they
often are. But while seasonal cooling brings a sense of freshening of mind,
it also pulls the melancholic down. Autumn is the season, after all, to be
“affective” in the deepest way possible, and reflective as well, as the light dims
and days shorten, reminding us of our mortality and of our limitated ability
to perceive and understand deeply. It is a season when the heart contracts in
the cooling air and one begins to doubt one’s capacity for generosity, for
compassion and love. This is the time when “nothing can bring back the
hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower,” and that leaves us at
the mercy of “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”5
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CHAPTER SIX
A Problem of Air
SCENE: Dr. Burtons House, later that night
ame Melancholy shifted her weight in the chair and pulled her stiff
D wings closer around her, a chill having set in as both the night and
her story grew deeper. Dr. Burton rose to replenish the candles and
stoke the dying fire. He had fallen into almost a reverie, watching the fire
weaken, listening to the sound of his guest’s voice, signs of fatigue obvious
but its timbre still rich. He had heard the stories of her life and times dozens
of times. But each time, it seemed, she accented some new details, or he
heard a slight nuance, and so he never tired of them. He had long ago found,
as his colleagues who practiced alchemy already knew, that repetition is not
always boring; it is a way of deepening what has already been learned.
The Blue Lady, as he always thought of her, never left him without
some gift. Not always tangible, not always appreciated—he regretted his
ingratitude often—but always something that eventually proved worthwhile:
an insight, an understanding of a psychological riddle, an opening into his
own soul, to a corner where he had avoided casting light. Now, however,
he was tired, and longed to return to the warmth of his bed and perhaps
the luxury of a dreamless, untroubled sleep. The old ambivalence pulled at
him again, and he found himself wishing she would leave but wanting more
from her.
“Would you like some more hot tea?” he asked.
She was so long answering he almost asked again. “Yes, thank you. I
always bring a chill, don’t I?” But her voice fell as she said this, so it was not
a question but a statement. She took a long, deep, breath, as if she were going
to be under water for a long time, and then slowly let it out, a sigh as long
and eloquent as Dr. Burton had ever heard.
When he had returned with the tea and sat down again, he asked her
kindly, “Good lady, I believe I can hear your distress when you breathe. I,
myself, sometimes wonder if I have a disturbance of the lungs. Is that not

so for you?”
“Yes, you’re quite right. And as you know, the ancients knew this about
me, the effect I have on breathing. Before I was portrayed in my present
form, I was quite shapeless, appearing only as a dark, almost black humor
in the body. I was a bit younger then, but already I had great power to affect
a person’s mind and heart and could inspire greatness.” She leaned back a
little, but Dr. Burton noticed that she had forgotten her tea and its steam
was gone. He looked into the fire and smiled a little to himself, unable to
imagine that Dame Melancholy was ever young. Sometimes he could not
imagine that he himself had ever been young.
“These days, Dr. Burton, people think the mind is in the head, but
the ancients believed it was in the lungs. This is why, when I have a great
deal on my mind and feel mentally burdened, I sigh. The ancients were wise
to imagine me as located in the lungs. Actually, I’m quite comfortable there.
If the lungs are in good condition, my sighs are deeply satisfying. But for
anyone who has me in their lungs, my sighs often come unconsciously, with
no reason, and seem unconnected to anything. They are inconsolable sighs
and unaccountable, yet I know that people experience them as terribly
immediate and organic. My weight makes anyone who has me in their lungs
feel like there is a heavy rock on the chest, and that is why it is not a good
idea to tell such people to get things off their chest—a twentieth-century
colloquialism—because it is like telling Sisyphus to get that rock off his chest.
You can’t just change mythic realities that easily.”
“True,” sighed Dr. Burton. “Very true.”
Author's Interjection
Air and the Lungs
The mind wasn’t always where it is now, in the head. Melancholy is a

state of mind-darkness (or darkened consciousness) and so it is sometimes,
but not always, experienced somatically in the head (as headache, migraine,
stiff neck). I knew an eight-year-old girl, with the precociousness of a possibly
melancholic disposition, who said that melancholy “feels like a light rock
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A PROBLEM OF AIR
on my head.”1 Another eight-year-old described “depression” as “a flat tire

in my stomach,” all the tire’s air gone out. Some people carry their melancholy
on their backs, and a few have told me they locate melancholy in their knees,
where they feel “weak,” and this too shows the influence of Saturn, who rules
the knees.
The ancient Greeks imagined melancholy to be located in the lungs,
which were thought to be the organ of mind (as the liver was the seat of
passion). The Classical Greek word for “lungs” was phrenes, a word that
denoted an organ thought to contain a vaporous substance known as the
“blood-soul.” This substance is described as black or blackish. Being in the
middle of the torso, the lungs, or phrenes, were contained within the
midmost darkness of the body, hard to reach, largely inaccessible, as the
dark backroads of the mind are inaccessible and hidden. The quality and
condition of a person’s phrenes, or lungs, pointed to the quality and condition
of that person’s mind.
We may no longer think of the spleen’s bile turning “black” in the
melancholic person, or of a “blood-soul” that is black or blackish in color,
but we know that lungs do turn black: from cigarette smoke, coal dust, all
sorts of pollutants. To the ancients, both sides of what we now call “manic-
depression” belonged to the melancholic condition: mania, excess, frenzy, rage,
sorrow, grief, darkness, blackness. The blackness associated with anger was
thought to be poisonous, or toxic, putting one into an uncontrollable rage
or extreme distress. It darkened the mind, which was in the lungs.
The Greek poet Homer describes the phrenes as things close together
or of close texture, for example, a thicket, or twigs and branches of a tree, or
like the intricate multitude of branching passages and veins in the lungs.
The fineness and complexity of the structure of the lungs (as for us, of the
brain’s convolutions) were related to the fineness and complexity of mind.
The vaporous blood-soul (later to be refined in the theory of humors) moved
through the labyrinthine lung passages and was conditioned by them.
As the vital principle that thinks and feels and prompts to action, the
quality of this “blood-soul” and the lungs through which it flowed could
determine the course of one’s life. The blackness of the vapor suggests that
melancholy as a “blackened” state of mind is felt somatically in the lungs.
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The condition of the phrenes makes you melancholic or phrenetic—a condition

of sorrow, pensiveness, despair, or frenzy and extreme excitement. Either
melancholy or mania, or both together. The metaphor has been retained in
psychological language: though phrenes originally meant “lungs,” it persists
in modern usage with the ancient association of “mind,” as in schizo- (“split”)
phrenia, meaning “split mind.”
It is also of interest that the lungs are shaped to fit neatly around the
heart, and shut it in (as the rib cage encloses the lungs). So you may have
the melancholy of a protected but also shut-in or closed-off heart. This is
one of the long-recognized symptoms of melancholy, the lack of desire, hearts
desire (not lack of ability) to be involved with persons, work, or things. “I
don’t have the heart for it,” is the sigh of the melancholic, signifying less a
failure of will or courage than the absence of Eros, the desirous libido or
erotic engagement with life that has left the melancholic cold and dry, like
his humor.
Acute, profound attacks of melancholia are often somatized in the
lungs; it is a mode of psychic suffocation. Ordinarily, the lungs would go
about their business of drawing in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. This
is unremarkable breathing as usual. But such normal flow of air in and out
of the body presupposes clear passageways, open bronchial tubes, and
sufficient energy for the muscles to pump in and out. Ordinarily, one’s chest
doesn’t heave, it merely rises and falls gently, barely noticeable. This kind of
regular breathing is done easily, unconsciously, when one is occupied with
the present moment, or is motivated to the future.
The characteristic heavy sigh of melancholy carries the sadness, or
weight, or grief of the thought or memory that burdens the lungs. But the
sigh may also be a resignation to or acceptance of fate, a somatic as well as
psychological realization that things are the way they are and nothing can
change them. “Letting the air out” is a release of anxiety, fear, inhibition,
constraint, and so the deep melancholic sigh brings a certain kind of relief,
however minimal, however brief.
“Breath” has always been a physical expression of “spirit.” (Biblically,
the “breath of life” is the spirit of God.) Difficulties in breathing that originate
in the lungs signify spiritual constriction, trouble inhaling and exhaling
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A PROBLEM OF AIR
“spirit”; one is dispirited or in low or poor spirit. The lungs, as the traditional
locus of melancholy, are partly responsible (along with the bowels) for the
making of “bad air.”
The quality of the air one breathes is every bit as important as the
quality of the lungs. Burton notes in his Anatomy ofMelancholy that “bad
air” is one of the “six unnatural things” that “causes” melancholy. One thinks
immediately, and depressingly, of air pollution and smog. But “air,”
understood metaphorically, refers to the element of imagination, or fantasy,
or imaginative thought. The old alchemists, their medical colleagues, and
spiritual directors worked with “air” as a transformative agent because air is
the “spirit” that “inspires.” “Bad air” means bad imagination, imagination
that labors with “emphysema” or “asthma,” can’t get air in or out.
Imagination that has become impoverished, starved (“poor diet,” as Burton
would say), or constricted (retentive, constipated) is the classic symptom of
“depression”: too few images, only one or two thoughts or fantasies that keep
turning on themselves, closing in, oppressing. Bad air, can’t breathe.
The deeper the melancholy, the heavier the weight of the past, and the
darker its memory. The paralysis of melancholy—not mere lethargy or
apathy—is just that: paralysis, bringing the entire organism to a halt. The
quicksand analogy is most apt and used often. It is, at such times, truly futile
to cast about for “things to do” to relieve the suffocation, lift the blackness,
find a motivation one had perhaps just a day or two earlier. The primary—
indeed, only—concern of the melancholic person who is “suffocating” is to
keep breathing. All mental activity, which is already minimal at best, must
be directed to the lungs, since all of one’s thinking is trapped in that labyrinth.
The necessity here is to keep repeating, “Breathe. Keep breathing. Take a
deep breath. Breathe. Again.” The only motivation is survival, which is, at
this primal level, biological, and represents nothing more than unconscious
obedience to the instinct for self-preservation.
When the heaviness of melancholia enters the body in full force, it
practically obliterates the imagination (destroys the future) and dumps the
entire past right into the chest cavity. The passageways, the tubes, are not
clear. They are filled with the sludge of all history: the personal failures; the
ancestral sins and rejections of family; lifelong complexes that keep their
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poison, inimical to love; sharp-edged, permanently-etched memories of the

unspeakable horror of things one has seen, said, or done; the ocean of
loneliness in which one is eternally cast adrift. With no flares for rescue, one
will go down without a trace, and no one will care.
As if this were not enough to pile on and into the chest, there are also
large chunks of older history, other histories of other people, some dead
centuries before. Indeed, the dead centuries pile up like heavy stacks of old
used calendars, the oppressive weight of years and decades and time gone
by, and with that weight comes the suffocating sense of no change, no way
out, no end, no new beginning, no way to breathe—and the air is dead too.
The Body and Its Mythic Matter
It is not accidental that so many physical illnesses and problems are

attributable to old Saturn, and appear in children and women as well as in
eternally young men. Symptomatically, the puer, the eternal youth, shows
an affinity with Saturn/Senex (“old man”) in those areas traditionally the
province of Saturn: digestive problems (“cold stomach,” says Robert Burton),
sometimes stomach ulcers at a young age, diarrhea, and tuberculosis. And
it is no accident, either, that tuberculosis was called “consumption” in the
nineteenth century because, like Saturn, it consumed the young life.
Digestive and diarrhea problems are obvious symptoms of the
melancholic in that they are metaphors for the inability to take in, process,
or hold nourishment, and an equal inability, in constipated states, to expel,
process, or eliminate toxic wastes. More importantly, where Saturn rules, one
has trouble stomaching much needed nourishment and dealing with basic,
elemental matter, in the form of crude emotions, the raw unrefined sewage
of psychic life—too much pissing or too little shitting, diarrhea or
constipation, bladder and bowel troubles, gut-clenching frustration,
tightening, or (undisciplined) incontinence. Running off at the mouth
happens at the other end, too.
It is vital to recognize to what a profound degree the senex, the “old
man,” is the author of so many psychosomatic symptoms, and not only for
elderly people. Indeed, Jungian analyst Murray Stein suggests that the senex,
personified in the god Ouranos, father of Kronos/Saturn, is the archetypal
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A PROBLEM OF AIR
base for all psychosomatic symptoms. Mythically, Ouranos causes these bodily
symptoms because he forces his unborn children from his mate, Gaia, the
Earth, back into her earth body. In his fear of being overthrown, he allows
no new heir (air) to come forth; since any one of them may potentially be
his undoing, he stifles them all. Then, Stein says, “the repressed children
materialize, and the somatic base (Gaia) groans with the burden.”2 The
children become the matter with us when we are sick. When a death-spirit
is incorporated and imprisoned in the body of earth—our physical bodies—
we get sick.
Though pre-eminent among the ancient gods, Saturn is not the only
divinity whose figure appears everywhere in the experience and portrayals
of melancholy. As there is a Father, so there is a Mother, and she is Gaia,
the Earth.
There is a melancholy of Saturn, who swallows up and permits no new
life, a dry melancholy that may reach despair. But there is also a melancholy
of Gaia, of the earth, of the mother, a damp melancholy that keeps one in
misery and tears, unable to bring forth the new life that lies buried deep
within. According to Greek myth, Gaia was the mother of Chronos (Saturn),
the youngest of her sons. Her mate, Ouranos the Sky god, fearing one of
his sons would overthrow him and seize his throne, forced Gaia to keep her
children within her deep body. This was a great torment to Gaia, and she
plotted to overthrown him herself through the strength and cunning of
Chronos, who, wielding an iron sickle Gaia had fashioned from her own
substance, cut off the genitals of Ouranos and flung them into the sea. The
myth continues with the story of the birth of Aphrodite, who was generated
from the severed organs and rose from the foam out of the sea. But that is a
different story, of love and regeneration and beauty.
The sense of stifling constriction, the dread of descent and weight of
loss, burial in the deep underworld of psyche, is at the heart of melancholia.
It is entombment in the bowels of Gaia, who groans in travail, unable to
bring forth her young, unable to regenerate herself through her children.
To be inside Gaia is to experience the raw, uncultivated substance of one’s
soul. One may be swallowed by the Father or choked in the Mother. There
is not only the dry, sterile, near-blackness of the saturnine, “male” mode of
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melancholy; there is also the wet, darkly fertile, insupportable and unmovable
“female” heaviness of the deepest blue melancholy: mourning becomes inertia.
The first of these modes, heaviness of mind, has been at times equated
with spirituality, the dry spiritual austerity that used to drive men to barren
deserts in search of purity and to do penance, and sometimes it drove them
to madness as well. The other mode of melancholy, of the earth, has been at
times associated with degeneracy and the metaphors of decay that comes from
dampness: soil(ed), mud, shit. Spiritual melancholy has been accorded the
status of near-virtue in Western Christian history; soulful earth melancholy,
with its “feminine” associations, has been a vice. Men struggle heroically,
desperately, to ascend, to overcome the depressive pull downward; women
get со-dependently stuck in the muck. Men aspire, women inspire them, or
expire themselves. The attachment of these kinds of value judgments to
Melancholy has not helped in our understanding of her.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
On the Tyranny of Balance

SCENE: Dr. Burtons House, at dawn
r. Burton was sound asleep in his chair, his head slumped forward
D and slightly sideways, at an awkward angle. Dame Melancholy had

spent the last uncounted hours staring at the cooling remains of the
evening’s fire, not seeing them, her breathing interspersed with deep sighs
in an almost musical rhythm. Now, sensing that light would soon be slipping
through the cracks in the shuttered windows, she stirred, her wings beginning
to rise slightly as she rose from her chair. She began to shake off some of the
lethargy that had deepened in the night. A few small feathers from her wings
fell unnoticed on the worn wooden floor, dancing away in the little air
currents formed by her movements. Just as she turned to look at her host,
Dr. Burton awoke. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, and though not
yet fully awake, he had already forgotten his dream. The first sensation was
the stiffness in his aching neck. The second was the gaze of the Blue Lady,
always unsettling to him, still after all these years. She never decreased in
anything, he thought with a trace of annoyance.
“I know you had hoped I’d be gone by now, Dr. Burton,” Dame
Melancholy smiled, although the set of her jaw betrayed something other
than good humor. “I am preparing to leave. Don’t be alarmed.”
“Nonsense, Lady! You are my guest. I am not so discourteous as to
wish you to leave.” Dr. Burton hated having to lie for the sake of propriety.
But he was tired and worn out, irritable as he often was in the early morning,
and his neck did not feel correctly attached to his body. He wondered briefly
if the lost dream might have been important.
“No need to stand on social niceties, Dr. Burton,” she said, rubbing
her hands for warmth. “I know perfectly well your feelings for me. They swing
from the bitterest hatred to the sweetest admiration. The pendulum never
comes to rest in the middle. Is that not so?”
Dr. Burton, embarrassed, and angry at being made so, said curtly, “Yes,
quite right. But I am not entirely to blame for that, my Lady. You bring it
every time you visit. It is in your nature to drive me to aesthetic highs and
abysmal lows—in fact, you do this to all those you visit, unless I am much
mistaken. I think perhaps you do not know me better than I know you. I
think perhaps we are equals in that regard ....” He stopped abruptly, surprised
at his own outburst, and the unusual length of his speech. He was shocked
and gratified to find how angry he was.
Dame Melancholy smiled faintly, her expression so full of mixed
emotions Dr. Burton could not begin to guess what she wanted or would
do next. She said in a cool but not unkind voice, “Be at ease, Dr. Burton,
be at ease. You are quite right in all you have said. And you are right to be
angry, as well. I do not conjure up the lovely emotions when I come. Do
not fear; I am not offended.”
“Well, thank you, Lady, but I—”
“No, no, don’t apologize or try to soothe me,” she waved her strong,
beautifully shaped hand in the air, as if brushing aside the obstacle that had
suddenly come between them. “You are right! I say it again—you are right
that I am a difficult set of complex contradictions. Sometimes even I do not
understand myself at all.”
Mollified, but still half-angry, Dr. Burton, rose slowly and stiffly and
bent to pick up the tea cups. “Yes. Well. Of course. I see. I shall bring some
more tea. And bread and cheese.”
“You are too regular in your habits, Dr. Burton. Do you not often find
yourself bored?” Dame Melancholy stood with her back to the fireplace, her
arms folded across her formidable chest.
The air around her filled with belligerence. For the first time since she
had arrived Dr. Burton looked directly and without blinking into her eyes. He
knew she was not his enemy, but he felt like fighting. She was provoking him.
He was sure of it. But the weight of a lifetime ofconvention had become a heavy
suit of medieval armor encasing him, protective to be sure, but also a prison,
making his inward movements inflexible. He began to struggle against his own
restrictions and grew angrier the more he realized how limited his range of
responses, how constricted his views ofhealth and proper behavior, had become.
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ON THE TYRANNY OF BALANCE
“I am an extremist, Dr. Burton. That is your problem.”

Startled, he stared at her again, his anger momentarily forgotten in her
unexpected remark.
“What?” he said.
“I am an extremist. Nothing in your world allows for that, Dr. Burton.
Even you, yourself, a man of considerable education and experience, have
difficulty recognizing this aspect of my nature. I am not interested in
balancing things, not interested in measuring everything out so that all comes
out equal in the end.” She suddenly swept up her gown and began to throw
logs carelessly into the fireplace. Dr. Burton thought for a moment she was
planning to start a conflagration just to take the slight chill out of the
morning air.
“What are you saying, my Lady? That balance of all things in life is
not a worthy goal?”
“Yes, exactly, Dr. Burton! That is exactly what I am saying. It is heresy,
I know.” She laughed, the first time Dr. Burton could remember seeing her
laugh, and he was amazed at how shocking and natural it was in her.
Laughter. He was simply amazed.
“Do you have a bit of kindling?” she asked. “The fire is quite dead.”
Still speechless, he pointed to the large bucket behind the stack of logs.
“I can see in your face, Doctor, that you are, shall I say, thrown off
balance by my remarks. But consider this: all of civilization as you know it
has promoted the idea of being well-balanced in all areas of life—balancing
of humours of the body, tempering of intense emotions, moderation in all
attitudes and conduct—and what has this gained your civilization? Boredom.
Mediocrity. Not true wisdom, but conventional platitudes.” She dropped a
huge armful of kindling into the fireplace, oblivious to the fact that it was
four times more than necessary.
“Boredom? Mediocrity?” Dr. Burton shook his head, looking for
understanding and not finding it. “How can this be? What are you
suggesting?”
“I am not suggesting anything at all, merely stating the matter as I see
it. Say what you like in praise of a life lived in balance, I will stand for the
life lived in the extreme, to the fullest—not in the safe middle of anywhere
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but at the edge of everywhere. The worst lows and the most ecstatic highs.
That is what I want.”
“Is it possible? Would it not be impossibly tiring if it were?”
“Yes, very tiring. Perhaps even life-shortening for you mortals. I don’t
know if it is possible, but I want to think it is. Look at these wings, Dr.
Burton—these wings are too great and heavy for me to ignore, but not strong
enough to lift me off the ground. You see, I carry in my own body that which
longs to soar beyond the skies and which yet keeps me low upon the ground.
It is a kind of passion, a craving for ultimate freedom, which I can never
fully realize. And truth to tell, I would not want it any other way, even though
any other way would be so much easier.”
“What shall I make of this?” Dr. Burton opened his hands, hoping
she would place in them an explanation. “Shall I abandon a lifetime of
regulated habit that has brought me some measure of security, and some
modest social position? Even if I so wished, how could I share your passion?
I have no wings.”
“Oh, but you do, Dr. Burton. You do.” She stepped away from the
fireplace and gestured grandly toward it. “There, everything is ready. Why
don’t you light the fire?”
O Author’s Elaboration
ur modern fantasy of physical and psychological health is one of

“balance.” In fact, our idea of health is practically synonymous with
balance. The healthy person is well-balanced: eats a balanced diet, gets a
balanced regimen of exercise and rest, weighs in on a balanced scale, and
has a balanced budget. When a person or society goes over the edge—that
is, leaves the fantasy of balance—or goes to an extreme in anything, we say
they are “unbalanced,” meaning crazy or unhealthy.
This fantasy of balance, which is also our ideal of health, makes special
problems for the melancholic person, whose temperament is naturally one
of extremes. The problem melancholics face is that they have been declared
unhealthy, even at times condemned not only for “unbalanced,” excessive
moodiness, sadness, and pensiveness (“You think too damn much!”), but
also for an excess of greatness, passion for the intellectual life (“elitism”),
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and a cool, solitary arrogance that is often the precondition and hallmark of
creative mental work. Pause here to remember that melancholy is the
unbalanced condition particularly of poets, artists, and scholars.
But “balance” is an archetypal fantasy of an ideal which never appears
in nature and cannot be actually attained. Planetary orbits are not balanced,
nor the length of seasons, nor the ratio of water to land, nor the size of animals
to their prey. Balance suggests perfection—also never found in human reality.
And yet, most of our psychologies today assume an original state of balance,
an Edenic condition, to which therapists try to “return” or “restore” their
more or less “unbalanced” patients, and which everyone tries to “recover.”
We might gain a better appreciation for the melancholic temperament
if we start with a reversal of the “balance” fantasy, and consider that the
original state of things is unbalanced, disordered, chaotic. Most mythic
versions of creation assume primal disorganization (and even the Garden of
Eden, image of perfect harmony, only comes into being after God is finished
creating—he then has to organize creation to make it habitable for
humankind). In the beginning, according to the Greeks, there was Chaos,
literally meaning “the great yawn,” out of which comes order. Neither mythic
accounts nor theological explanations nor the events of human history
support the idea that “in the beginning” there was balance. Rather, there
was confusion and disorder and imbalance, and for most of us there still is.
And this is not all bad because “balance” can be excruciatingly boring, and,
in fact, rests on that perfectly still centerpoint at which movement—and
life—stops.
The absolutely right combination of humors would make you
absolutely healthy. It also would make you like every other absolutely healthy
person: absolutes allow no deviations. Personally, I would rather be deviant
than be exactly like anybody else, even if it means not being in absolutely
perfect health. But the ancients apparently did not worry about this, since
they recognized that absolute health was an unattainable ideal anyway.
Furthermore, the theory of humors itself provided an antidote to the fantasy
of “balance.” While the humors, as fundaments of human physiology, were
the origins of illness, it was possible for one humor to predominate in an
individual without causing illness. The normal predominance of one humor
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over the others eventually came to be associated with the development of a

normal disposition or temperament and its characteristics, rather than with
the symptomatology of an illness.
The alchemical tradition also viewed the natural condition of the
world and the human psyche as chaotic in its original state, and saw the
work of alchemy as a means of ordering (which is not the same as
balancing) this chaos. Jung’s theory of individuation is in this tradition,
in that Jung conceives of the work of becoming conscious as an opus contra
naturam, a “work against” the chaos of undifferentiated nature (the
collective unconscious).
Though hardly anyone nowadays is willing to say so, there is much to
be said for the “unbalanced” character; in fact, character is strengthened
largely by a willingness or need to go to extremes. Balance is, in one sense,
an average, everything on one level—certainly nothing exceptional or
outstanding. The Greek idea of a naturally unbalanced humoral composition
which forms temperament is still useful as a metaphorical description of
personality. Instead of predominant humors, we have predominant archetypal
patterns that govern our psychic, and probably physical, lives. Unevenly
stamped in the individual psyche, these archetypal patterns produce those
various root complexes, or life themes, which form the basis for both character
and pathology. Character is always unbalanced (even in cases of excessive
moderation). And it should be noted that an extreme, unbalanced character
is the hallmark of eccentricity, that peculiar mix of odd traits that mark the
individual as truly one-of-a-kind. 1
By performing the “work against nature” toward consciousness, we
paradoxically return to a condition of confusion and distress. The work itself,
therapeutic and alchemical, requires an excess of devotion, extreme passion
and need, immoderate attentiveness, narcissistic absorption. Like all
psychological efforts that slowly bring about transformation, the work is
circular, going against the natural urge to remain unconscious (asleep,
ignorant, innocent), and leading back to the natural condition of disordered
chaos, from whence the cycle begins again and again.
We actually become more unbalanced and disordered as we individuate.
Our sicknesses become more pronounced, and this is as much because our
110
pathologies are thrown into sharper relief as psyche ripens, as it is because

our bodies age and settle into characteristic shapes and infirmities. We do
not move in a linear progression, from sickness to health, from
unconsciousness to consciousness, from imbalance to balance; but rather we
become characterized by our pathologies. For it is our pathologies, our
wounds, infirmities, and disabilities as well as our heroic strength and
spiritual will, that make for character. “Health” is an abstract idea; sickness
is individual reality. And it is through our pathologies that we are best known,
by our doctors, therapists, families, friends, and lovers.
My great-aunt Eva, whose story I now tell, was one of those who resisted
balance and moderation all her long life. She was, as the family always said in
that disparaging tone that betrays lack of understanding, a character. Indeed.
SCENE: New York and NewJersey, 1900-1983

A Tale ofDame Melancholy’s Sister: Portrait ofAunt Eva
va, known as “the Witch” in my mother’s family, was diagnosed with
E manic-depression (or just depression, depending on who’s telling the

story) and hospitalized twice in her long, unconventional, infuriating life.
She never married, which accounts for most of the family’s hostility toward
her, and so never passed on her presumably inferior genetic legacy. (Sadly,
Aunt Eva has not won familial gratitude thereby.) Born in 1900, she was
the first woman in my family (on either side) to attend and graduate from
college, had at least two careers (journalism and fashion design), was
something of a political radical, lived in the same New York residential
hotel room for more than forty years, and died, after being evicted for
refusing to pay a rent increase, alone in a Manhattan hospital at the age
of eighty-three.
One of Eva’s great and wonderful obsessions was keeping everything—
every single thing—she had ever written, accumulating dozens of boxes of
letters, college term papers, business correspondence, grocery lists, laundry
receipts. After she died, my uncle, as the lawyer in the family, took
responsibility for handling her pitifully small estate. But my uncle, who was
111
himself then seventy-four years old, still nursed a half century of hatred of
her, because she and his mother (Eva’s sister) had fought and argued bitterly
most of their lives, and the trail of accusations and betrayals they left behind
was long and wide. In my uncle’s mind, his mother could do no wrong, so
all the blame for hurt feelings, misunderstandings, unkept promises and failed
hopes, fell upon Aunt Eva’s proud but unsteady shoulders.
When she died, he took all the boxes of Eva’s papers and burned them.
He did not see the connection between his action and like-minded witch
hunters of centuries past. And so, through the papers and scraps that
contained her life, Eva, condemned from the beginning as the family witch,
was consigned to the flames at her death.
I often wonder if Aunt Eva, with her thick, impossibly black hair and
glittering black eyes, would have fared better had she been born forty or fifty
years later, in a time a little more congenial to female aspirations and political
radicals. She was a seeker after worthy causes but seems never to have found
a place to put her “genius,” which was, apparently, a talent for making trouble
wherever she went and disturbing whatever she touched. I have always
suspected that the twice-given psychiatric diagnosis of “manic-depression” was
more politically motivated by the family and doctors than it was
psychologically descriptive.
But she had all the symptoms, all right; and as with most other erratic,
eccentric melancholics, and especially because she was a woman, and because
she produced no great literature or music, the family found it easier to
commit her to Bellevue Hospital as crazy than to allow her to follow her
melancholic muse. It was, after all, a family of Jewish immigrants who made
good, and whose collective well-being depended on living as conventionally
as possible. But even though Eva’s melancholy consigned her to spend
decades of her life in the Jewish equivalent of Purgatory and then took her
straight on to Hell, I (nostalgic romantic that I unabashedly am) believe
she would have chosen that over the life of the ordinary, gray-toned, well-
balanced, moderate, sanely rational lady. With feisty loyalty to her truest,
albeit somewhat crazed soul, she resisted even the outer semblance of
“health,” which she must have experienced as stifling conformity and the
smallness of a tranquilized imagination.
112
And yet, not having directly inherited her genes, I seem to have
inherited her attitude, her aversion to marriage, her unstudied eccentricity,
and most certainly her disposition to melancholy. I met her only once, when
I was twelve and she was fifty-two, and I remember being fascinated by and
slightly afraid of her. She had a faint but unmistakable air of decadence about
her, as if she had never been able to figure out how life was supposed to be
lived and so had given up the effort. What she may have wanted us to see
as casual confidence came out more as a cloud of defeat. Her whole
appearance seemed a work of contrivance: too much make-up, ill-fitting
clothes, odd pieces of jewelry, all of which made her look like she was in a
mildly exaggerated theatrical costume rather than stylishly dressed. And she
held her head almost always slightly bent to the side in a manner that
suggested an endearing quizzical nature, but might just as well have been
wary suspicion.
If I had known her, I think I would have liked her, in some guilty way.
But I am grateful to her for being the family outcast, for living to the ripe
age of eighty-three, for being passionately loyal to her solitary, deviant,
melancholy self. This is her legacy to me, my inheritance from her. She passes
these gifts on to me not through genes, but through my memory and
imagination of her. In a way far more significant than a bit of genetic
material, she becomes part of my character, which, as Heraclitus said, is Fate.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Greatness, Passion, Madness

SCENE: Dr. Burtons House, before dawn
hen Dr. Burton returned with the fourth round of tea—more
W for his own need than for hers—Dame Melancholy was pacing
slowly around the small room, deep in thought. The
characteristic frown was on her brow and she rubbed her hands from tim
to time. Instinctively Dr. Burton recognized the gesture, for it was one of
his own, this rubbing of hands while pacing. Sometimes it was to bring
warmth to cold fingers, but more often it was to generate an idea, create a
friction in the mind, as if the hands were sticks that could ignite a flame.
“Do you know, Dr. Burton, what puts me into an agitated state?” She
said this as if it were an accusation, stopping suddenly and fixing him with
her knife-like stare.
He shuddered, not knowing the answer, and growing very agitated
himself as he watched her barely contain her wings. They rose and fell with
her breathing, which now was hard, and the room was either shrinking or
she was growing larger. As she moved around the room, oblivious to her effect,
her wings brushed everything, almost knocking over a small, marvelously
made clock on the fireplace mantel, a gift to him from a fellow cleric from
Oxford, as well as a small teapot, which had belonged to his mother and her
mother. And a carved instrument of wood, called a “pipe,” obtained from an
acquaintance of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, along with a gift of tobacco from the
New World. And Dame Melancholy’s wings barely missed the free-standing
piles of books and stacks of papers, threatening chaos each time she turned.
She was completely unaware of all this, but Dr. Burton noticed all too well,
and thought it best to humor her and to concentrate on willing her to sit down.
“I know not what agitates you, good Lady, but pray, won’t you sit down?
Here, another fine cup of tea. Just the thing to soothe the soul in turmoil,
don’t you agree?”
But she was too preoccupied and paid no attention, swinging around
again and knocking over a small empty candleholder with her expanding
wing. For a moment Dr. Burton was seized with the comedy of the scene,
but as she swept past the treasured clock again he gasped and said, “Really,
my Lady, you must calm yourself and be seated, before damage is unwittingly
done. I fear my poor house is too small for your greatness.”
“You are absolutely right, Dr. Burton!” cried Dame Melancholy.
“Greatness! That is what agitates me, even brings anger, for we see so little
of it. So little passion in the world, so little greatness! So many small minds
and weak hearts! No wonder the ancient gods have abandoned your race
and withdrawn beyond the peaks of Olympus. There are so few who dare to
imagine great things.”
“Ah, well, you ask perhaps too much of us. We are frail creatures, really,
fearful and unsure. We do not live long and it is hard to live well. Not all of
us have the genius, nor the stamina.”
She was listening to him now. She loved engagement, especially an
argumentative one. “But you humans have all you need for greatness, and
what you lack I give you freely.”
“You refer, I gather, to the gift of yourself. As St. Gregory called you,
the divine melancholy’.”
“Of course! Am I not, myself, the greatest of the Muses? Do I not lead
you into the unreachable places of your soul and reveal great things and
knowledge? Surely, Dr. Burton, you of all people, who have been one of my
chief beneficiaries, must know this.”
“Yes, my Lady, I know this. But I tell you in all truth, your gift is a
dark one, and hard to bear, and many retreat from it. Even I cannot but
feel—” He halted for a moment and looked down at his tea. “They feel they
have not the capacity to answer you, to wear the laurel wreath as you do;
they do not have wings as you do, they cannot sustain that fierce vision that
sees so deeply and does not flinch. We are mere mortals, my Lady. You ask
too much.”
“Yes,” said Dame Melancholy, her eyes drifting away from him, looking
inward again. “I suppose I do. I am immoderate, Dr. Burton, and do not
count patience among my virtues. I wish to inspire to greatness and confer
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GREATNESS, PASSION, MADNESS
genius, but bring madness instead.” Her wings were lower now, and Dr.
Burton realized she carried most of her sorrow in them.
“Not madness instead of greatness and genius. Most often you bring
all together at the same time. And therein, Lady, lies the vexation and
the difficulty.”
Author’s Interjection
n ancient times, the melancholic temperament was regarded as in some
I sense heroic, or necessary to the heroic character. It was, after all, the
temperament most likely to be touched by divinity and most receptive to it.
The melancholic person tended to live in extremis, on the edge of danger,
sanity, genius, and so appeared to be most vulnerable to “possession” by a
god who would work the divine will through that mortal coil.
This perception of the melancholic disposition was idealized still further
among the ancients through melancholia’s association with “frenzy,” a
condition of the highest spiritual exaltation. The ancient Greeks thought
that epilepsy was a virulent form of melancholy, a somatized uncontrollable
frenzy. An epileptic seizure was recognizably a state of enthusiasmos (literally,
“being filled with a god”). In medical terms, one spoke of the humor of
melancholy, or the agitated condition of black bile. In Platonic terms, “frenzy”
was that agitated melancholy which delivers one over to god-possession and
divine madness.
Sometimes, the virulent melancholic frenzy was sent as a punishment
by the gods, inflicted on heroes such as Hercules, Ajax, and Bellerophon,
and this too reinforced the association of melancholy with heroism.
These two perceptions, the medical and the philosophical/
psychological, came together in the idea that heroes and geniuses are all
melancholics, especially poets, artists, religious mystics, and philosophers,
including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This idea, uniting the body’s
humoral composition and the psyche’s temperamental disposition, was
the commonly held and accepted understanding of melancholia until the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. But the association of madness with
genius, and the figure of the mad artist, have remained alive into our
own time.
119
For the melancholic, there is a poorly demarcated line between

receptivity and vulnerability. What is taken in by the mind may cause the
heart to ache. A truly great idea may lead just as well to the shadowy depths
of the underworld as to the euphoric heights of Olympus. The anti
intellectualism that dominates the contemporary American cultural scene,
like the short-term/quick-fix attitude in psychotherapy, is, at least in part,
a defense against the ancient fear of melancholic madness. Instead of the
deep, reflective thinking that the melancholic state brings, we have pseudo
thoughts, which are not thoughts or ideas at all, but advertising slogans.
Popular psychology does not use a genuine imagistic and metaphorical
language of the psyche. Instead, it prefers unthinking jargon (about
“sharing” and “taking risks” and “growth” and “issues” and “borderline
personalities”). Psychotherapy students are less likely to learn courage from
“approved” training programs than common denominator technique, and
instead of new ideas through creative thinking, they get old biases through
reactive repetition.
Genius, or the infusion of creative inspiration, is not a matter of
conscious will, not ego-induced; and genius itself may be experienced as a
form of despair, or the inadequacy of the human vessel to grasp or enact the
divine purpose. The melancholic person was thought to be temperamentally
predisposed to a heightened vulnerability to the intellectual and emotional
turbulence the gods put into one’s mind, which could appear as a creative
frenzy (van Gogh, one bloody ear gone, forcing the “Starry Night” to explode
in color on the canvas), godlike physical strength (Hercules performing the
Twelve Labors), or profound despair (Leo Tolstoy considering suicide in a
religious crisis).
“Genius” is not merely the measurement of intelligence, not just an
exceptional intellectual capacity. “Genius” refers to the presence of what the
ancients called a daimon, a tutelary deity, a psychic “person” at work in the
individual that generated ideas and images. The Greek term daimon became
the Christian notion of demon, and we have come to treat genius and passion
with the same fear formerly reserved for the devil.1 Genius means excess,
passion means intensity; in modern times the substitutions for these are a
moralistic insistence on balance and the political correctness of moderate good
120
feeling. Thus does “genius” become demonized, and perhaps this is why we
seem to have so few geniuses on the national scene these days.
In its June 28, 1993 issue, Newsweek did a cover story on “The Puzzle
of Genius: New Insights Into Great Minds.” The article, drawn mainly
from the work of educator/psychologist/researcher/author Howard
Gardner, reports:
Biologists are having better luck identifying innate qualities of

temperament that foster genius. The genius’s drive to create
prolifically may be biological, Gardner suggests, “aris[ing] from
a temperament that seeks arousal.” An innate deficit in a brain
chemical does seem to drive people compulsively to seek physical
or intellectual highs—climbing a mountain, scaling a
mathematical peak.
The observation linking genius to temperament is old enough to sound

“new.” Ecclesiastes, muttering about “nothing new under the sun,” would
have gone numb with boredom listening to this. Plato would have merely
nodded and waited for the really new modern contribution to the puzzle of
genius. But while waiting, he would likely have taken issue with one of the
biologists’ assumptions; why assume a deficit in a brain chemical as the source
of genius? Why not imagine the smaller amount as the norm and address
the “problem of ordinariness” as an excess of genius-killing chemical?
The equation of the melancholic temperament with greatness and
genius is still with us, according to Newsweek-, but the deeper meanings of
“melancholy” and “genius” have been lost. Without its soul images of
mythic heroes and heroines enduring divine affliction, melancholy is
reduced to a “mood disorder.” In the collective desire to give everyone a
cost-of-living increase in self-esteem and democratize “creativity,” the
intrusive, tormenting demands of the daimones have been cast out as
demons of compulsivity.
O nce the western world succumbed to Cartesian dualism, all sorts of

splits inevitably followed: “reason” could not co-exist with “frenzy.”
(Which ought to make us wonder if it wouldn’t be a better idea to look for
121
the “cause” of “schizophrenia” in dualistic philosophy instead of in genes.)

Michel Foucault accurately observed that the language of Enlightenment
psychiatry, which is much the same in our age, is “a monologue of reason
about madness.”2
Medical psychiatry, seeking that elusive goal of a sound mind in a sound
body, eventually had to separate and reduce the melancholic’s divine madness
to the depressive’s bodily disorder. As Jung lamented, the madness, the god,
has become a disease.3 In Peter Shaffer’s stunning play, Equus, the psychiatrist
Dysart is called to treat a local 15-year-old schizophrenic boy, Alan, who has
inexplicably blinded six horses with a metal spike. Dysart, whose own life is
a dead routine of conventionality, begins to realize that the boy’s madness is
a state of possession, an enthusiasmos by Equus, a God who appears as a horse,
and that Alan’s passionate relationship with Equus is both the source of his
madness and at the same time the fullest expression of his capacity for genuine
religious experience. To cure the madness means to extinguish the passion.
As Dysart comes to understand Alan, he says earnestly to his new friend
Hesther, a magistrate:
Look ... to go through life and call it yours—your life—you first

have to get your own pain. Pain that’s unique to you. You can’t
just dip into the common bin and say “That’s enough!”... He’s
done that. All right, he’s sick. He’s full of misery and fear. ...
But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have
felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I
envy it. ... I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil
of Argos—and outside my window he is trying to become one,
in a Hampshire field! ... I watch [my wife] ...—a woman I
haven’t kissed in six years—and he stands in the dark for an hour,
sucking the sweat off his God’s hairy cheek!4
As Dysart’s therapeutic relationship with Alan deepens, so does his

anguish over the irreconcilable demands of his profession and the desire of
his soul:
I’ll take away his Field of Ha Ha, and give him Normal places
for his ecstasy—multi-lane highways driven through the guts
of cities, extinguishing Place altogether, even the idea of Place!
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He’ll trot on his metal pony tamely through the concrete

evening—and one thing I promise you: he will never touch hide
again! With any luck his private parts will come to feel as plastic
to him as the products of the factory to which he will almost
certainly be sent. Who knows? He may even come to find sex
funny. Smirky funny. ... Trampled and furtive and entirely in
control. ... I doubt, however, with much passion! ... Passion, you
see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.5
We may think that Dr. Dysart is himself more than a bit deranged.
But how much crazier is it that modern “treatments” for frightening
(“primitive,” as Dysart calls it) passions such as Alan’s are drugs, shock,
confrontation with the purest of cognitive logic, behavior modification (fine
arrogant way to treat a god!)—a whole militaristic array of therapies designed
to “treat” what the rational mind in its superiority judges to be sick.
One of the modern “causes” of melancholia may well be the militaristic
attitude we bring to what is declared psychopathological, treating afflictions
of the soul like enemies. No wonder so many of us are frightened of being
ambushed by any sort of melancholic madness. Seldom does it occur to
anyone, even professionals, who should know better, that what we call
“depression,” or melancholy, might have something instructive, necessary,
or helpful to say to its “victim.” We rarely imagine that this low, pressed
down condition is also an opportunity to keep our ear close to the ground
and hear something. And it is not always an enemy approaching. Author
Toni Morrison, whose genius is brilliantly apparent in every page she writes,
described her melancholic state this way:
... [T]he words “lonely, depressed, melancholy” don’t really mean

the obvious. They simply represent a different state. It’s an
unbusy state, when I am more aware of myself than of others.
... Sometimes when I’m in mourning, for example, after my
father died, there’s a period when I’m not fighting day-to-day
battles, ... and I am very passive, like a vessel. When I’m in this
state, I can hear things. As long as I’m busy doing what I should
be doing, what I’m supposed to be doing, what I must do, I don’t
hear anything; there isn’t anything there. This sensibility
occurred when I was lonely or depressed or melancholy or idle
123
or emotionally exhausted. I would think I was at my nadir, but

it was then that I was in a position to hear something.6
We could know, with poor Equus-worshipping Alan, that the Horse

God’s hoofbeats still thunder in the psyche, claiming passion, bringing a
mad enthusiasm, carrying us away to unimagined greatness of soul. But
we would have to get very low to the ground, touching ear to earth, and
wait and listen ....
SCENE: Points Northwest, Midwest, Southeast, and Northwest

Again, 1926-?
A Tale ofDame Melancholy’s Brother: Portrait ofStephen
or more than thirty years I had a friend who never ceased to delight me
F with his wit, talent, and generally outrageous puns. Stephen was an aging
puer aeternus, a permanently boyish spirit, whose youthful spontaneity and
capacity for wonder were at odds with his melancholic temperament. Born
under the sign of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, he labored under the heavy
hand of the frowning Father: both his own personal disapproving one, and
a patriarchal society, which accepted neither his talent, nor his homosexuality,
nor his perceived irresponsibility. He was the first to admit it was hard—
no, impossible—for him to imagine staying on a job longer than it was of
consuming interest to him, which was rarely more than a few months.
Though intensely loyal to friends and those he loved, the idea of fixing himself
in one place—job, marriage, city—was death to him.
He had a genius for entertaining—both people and ideas. A true
Renaissance man, he was a brilliant conversationalist and/or doer of
practically everything (architecture, theology, biographical personages, poetry,
gossip, the life of trees and plants, the manufacture of Chinese silk, and more,
and more, and yet more). When he cooked, like a French master chef, his
sauces never separated. He played the mandolin and sang Renaissance
madrigals and Mozart arias in a sweet, clear tenor voice, had a recitation of
Shakespeare for every occasion, painted in oils, acted professionally in theater,
and was familiar with antiques of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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He wore a moustache and neat little chin-beard which made him look like
an Elizabethan courtier. He dressed like a handsome prince, ate like a king,
and enjoyed playing the gallant rogue with ladies, all of whom were charmed
by the absence of an undertone of threatening sexual innuendo, and by his
hopelessly old-fashioned courtliness.
But Stephen was, by temperament, melancholic, and suffered all his
life under dark depressive clouds. I always believed the Fates had made a
cruel decision when they decreed twentieth century America as his time and
place of birth rather than the court of England’s Elizabeth I. He never had
enough money. He was one of those gifted people who had so many talents,
so many interests, and so little egotistic ambition, that he never really
accomplished anything of permanence; indeed, the very idea of permanence
was so frightening that he fled alternately into the happier future and back
into the impersonal past.
He never truly settled down psychologically into his marriage (made
for complicated reasons, not the least of which was the personal and collective
unacceptability of his homosexual orientation). He had no employment
record to speak of, and yet he was almost never without some sort of job.
His emotions were complex and ran deep, though he hid them from nearly
everyone, not because to show them was unmanly, but because it would have
been unseemly. Though he spent much time in self-reflection, his motivations
and moods were obscure even to himself; he pondered his failures and
inadequacies but was unable to do anything about them. He felt a vocation,
but did not know to what.
He was a good friend, loyal in feeling though unreliable in everything
else. I never forgave him for not showing up at my first major photographic
exhibit, though I never loved him less. He was always willing to listen to
my troubles, always had time for good coffee and talk, but was prone to
disappear into a blue melancholy for days or weeks, missing dinner
engagements, wasting theater tickets, leaving his wife to make his excuses
and go retrieve him.
He treated his Blue Lady Muse ambivalently—not as well as he treated
those dearest and closest to him, but then, she was more exacting and less
easily appeased. He tried to put her off, behind him as he ran headlong into
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the future, her inspiration vaporized in the heat of his escape, so that, when
the future arrived, he had nothing to show for it. I do not know for sure
what remembrances he keeps, or what memories keep him alive. But it always
seemed to me something of a tragic waste to watch his bright golden genius
fading to gray, unfixed, dissolving into the past. He fell short of being able
to fully embrace his fate, to be loyal to it and experience that amor fati of
which his Renaissance-era psychic mentors spoke so romantically.
When Stephen was sixty-two, his joints stiffening rapidly from arthritis,
he found he could no longer deny his loneliness and longing for a male
companion. He and his wife divorced, with angry sorrow and some relief. A
new partnership with a man did not last long, however, and three years later
he went back to the place of his childhood and family home, or what was
left of it, in the forest wilderness of the Pacific Northwest mountains, far
from all the urbane, sophisticated civility he loved and cultivated. It was an
act of cyclical completion as much as a regression. I hoped for him that he
would find some restfulness starting a new life in his old age, some
contentment that did not depend on fulfilling those requirements the world
demands for success: punctuality, perseverance, hard and/or boring work in
distasteful surroundings, gratitude for inadequate wages. Time, who is
Saturn/Chronos, will tell if Stephen has become a mellow melancholic,
ruminating on the human condition, or an embittered, irascible melancholic,
muttering against Heaven and taking antacid for his bile.
In his soul, Stephen was a gentle Christian man, loving peace, loving
God, loving his cat, loving old furniture and old friends. While Jesus
governed his spirit, Dame Melancholy ruled his soul; it was not an easy
arrangement. Jesus, whom he worshipped, commanded his devotion, which
he gave willingly from the heart and without reservation. His Lady
Melancholy, his Muse, whom he loved, wanted only constancy, the one thing
he could not give.
But perhaps it is different with him, now that he is home.
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CHAPTER NINE
Barren Windows: Acedie

SCENE: Dr. Burtons House, Dawn, 29 July, 1638
r. Burton’s head snapped up as if he’d been struck under the chin,
D an involuntary gasp escaped him, and he realized he’d fallen asleep

at some point while Dame Melancholy was speaking. He had no
idea when that was. But the candles had gone out, the sun was beginning
to intrude through the small window, and his guest was nowhere in sight.
Her cup of tea, untouched, still sat pristinely in its saucer, the little silver
spoon that had belonged to his grandmother still nestled near the base of
the cup. It occurred to him, in a flash of irrelevancy, that he never needed to
give the Blue Lady a spoon since she never took sugar in her tea, but he
always did anyway.
He urged his stiff and still-weary body up and it obeyed reluctantly.
Rubbing his eyes and chin, he adjusted his spectacles, which were only
slightly awry since he’d slept sitting up.
“Madam?” he called. But clearly she was gone. He could always tell when
she had left by the hollow he felt in his chest and the odd sensation of lightness
in his head. He knew how she hated the morning—any morning, how she
found the sunlight too hard, too penetrating, and the summer heat too
burdensome. Even when the dawn sky looked to be only a poor gray, still she
pulled her great wings over her head and began a retreat. Dr. Burton thought
his tiny, cluttered house, with its small-paned windows, was as good a place
to wait as any. In the library, or right here in the overstuffed sitting room,
she could wait in solitude and anonymity for the weak comfort of the
rising moon.
The faintest of knocks, vaguely indecisive, sounded on his door. And
there she was again when he opened it, her wings drooping so low that the
lower third of them were dusty and limp, and some of the feathers were
hanging, ready to fall. It struck Dr. Burton with terrible poignancy that if
Dame Melancholy lost too many wing feathers, she would lose her balance
and fall, and would never be able to stand upright again. This was more terrible
to him than the fact that she would never be able to fly, because he understood
from her that she had never flown and was not sure she ever could.
She had been crying. The intensity was gone from her gaze; her eyes
glistened, but only with tears. He realized with alarm that some light had
gone out of her, and her face appeared darker. Even her gown seemed a darker,
duller blue, and she had lost her beautiful wreath.
“Oh, dear Lady,” he said softly, reaching toward her with both arms
to help her in. “What has happened to bring you to such a state? I must
have driven you away when I fell asleep. I am deeply sorry. ’Twas not my
intention to abandon you so. I am the poorest of hosts, the least faithful of
friends. Do come in again, and this time, you really must drink some good
hot English tea. And this time I shall not leave you alone in your need.”
“You are too kind, Dr. Burton,” said Dame Melancholy, her voice weak
and a little thick from her weeping. “But do not fear to be truthful with me:
I am not she whom you would most wish to see this day. I know how strong
is the fatigue I induce in you, as in all those I visit. Still, I must stay a while
longer with you, for I am truly in need, although neither you nor anyone in
this world or the next can help me fill it.”
“Surely, madam, it cannot be as bad as that! Surely God sees your plight
and will assist you.”
“Whether any of the gods see or not, good doctor, is of no concern to
me. It matters not. I am beyond that hope. Even speaking with you this
long night, and having you kindly listen, has not renewed hope or joy of
the future in me. I am old, Dr. Burton, very old—so old that I have few
sighs left, and after the last one I suppose I shall just not bother to breathe.
I have lost my wreath, Dr. Burton—accidentally perhaps, but as much, I
think, from carelessness—and so I have lost my sense of Fate, my vocation.”
Dr. Burton, alarmed and not at all sure what to do for his old friend,
put his arm as far as he could around her great winged shoulders and led
her to the same chair from which she had so recently fled, smoothed her
poor moulting feathers, tenderly brushed her wild hair back from her strained
and ravaged face.
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BARREN WINDOWS: ACEDIE
“Ah, dear friend. It hurts my heart to see you in such a state.”

“Do not grieve so for me, doctor. My passing—may it come soon—
can only mean a burden lifted from you.”
“You must not think so, Lady. For every trial you have brought me
you have brought ten gifts. The world will be immeasurably poorer without
you. You must not give yourself up to despair.”
He thought he saw the slightest movement of a smile in her lips, but
there was no amusement in it, and no sentiment. “I have already told you
of the harshness of my Father. Now let me tell you,” she said, “about despair.”
She took a distracted moment to smooth her wrinkled gown, to
no effect.
“I didn’t always look like this. I was never this full-bodied, never had
wings, nor a wreath. In this western part of the world, during the time of
your history you call “the Middle Ages,” people imagined me as rather ugly—
sinister, sneaking around. In pictures of me from that time you can see I am
thin, as if I was hungry all the time, a scavenger no one would take in. They
show me with small eyes and a thin, pointed nose, and I am hunched over
and old-looking, and generally, not at all someone whose company you’d
want to keep. Often I am shown as a man, too, a shrunken version of my
Father Saturn, but with the same miserly attitude and dark fear in my whole
bearing. I look cowardly.
“To be honest, Dr. Burton, I hate those portrayals of me. I look, to
put it bluntly, like sin. I was never welcome anywhere, always dreaded as if
I were the Devil himself—which, in fact, is how people thought of me. They
were afraid of my Father, and yet they worshipped him in their own medieval
version of theology, and I cut a poor ragged figure next to the beloved virginal
Mary, who was beautiful in every way. They believed she was the Mother of
God—why could they not see that I was his daughter? And why do so many
people still not see me as I really am? Then again, in another three hundred
years I will have no portrayals at all ....
“Sometimes, Dr. Burton, my sorrow is so deep that I feel all the air
will rush out of me in a great dry wind of despair. And would that not bring
a certain peace? ”
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Author’s Commentary on Acedie1
I turned
And gazed aloft to barren windows, to the
midnight candle of the thinker,
Who pondered, pondered, but could not
invent redemption from his doubt ...
—Gertrude Kolmar, Out of Darkness2
It is not hard to understand the mourning of Dame Melancholy, who,

dressed in the rags of modern psychology, feels she is going to hell. Therefore,
her “salvation” is the proper concern of religion. So we must pay a visit to
former times, when those who suffered acedie, that terrible affliction of
spiritual despair, found no hope but at least sanctuary in the house of God.
A BriefDiscourse on the Medieval View of Things
We turn back to the Middle Ages for a proper understanding of the

spiritual dimension of melancholia, since this dimension has largely been
lost in our age. For Westerners, to be in a medieval frame of mind means
that Christianity is simultaneously the generator of melancholy and the
defense against it. And the reverse also: to be in a Christian frame of mind—
hardly avoidable for anyone in the Western world, believer or not—is to be
in some sense in a medieval mind-set, a medieval Weltanschauung, or world
view. In the twenty-first century there are still countless people who are
probably closer spiritually to the High Middle Ages than to either the
Renaissance or the Enlightenment. “Medieval” is not a just a historical period
but an attitude toward the world, a value system and set of assumptions about
the world. Thus, it is timeless and chronic, and walks into the consulting
room daily each time a patient comes in who has fallen into that condition
formerly known as acedie, the arid, despairing condition of the soul that has
lost all joy. Today it is loosely called “severe depression,” or worse, “inability
to cope with stress.” In the most crass dismissal, it is called “malingering.”
Other ages have designated it as psychasthenia (literally “weak psyche”),
neurasthenia (“weak nerves”), failure of nerve (fearfulness), or failure of will
(weak character).
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In medieval thinking, melancholy came from sin. Sin was the blackness
that stained the bile, and the bile turned black with bitterness and sins and
crimes against God, and all this poisoned the spirit. In the pre-Renaissance,
pre-Reformation, medieval world, Catholic Europe was a pessimistic place.
Hardly anybody stood a serious chance of going to heaven (and then only
after a long, unpleasant sojourn in Purgatory), although everyone believed,
and most everyone hoped. Everyone was a “sick soul”—in William James’s
sense of the phrase. The cheerful optimism of humanistic Christianity or
secular humanism would have been unfathomable to the medieval mind,
since neither of these “isms” (not so different from each other) accurately
describes the world as the medieval person experienced it.
This is important for contemporary therapy, because contemporary
individuals who are sorely “depressed” are often in a “medieval” frame of
mind: they are filled with sin and guilt, although they are more likely to call
these by newer names: poor coping skills, bad choices, low self-esteem. The
world is an evil place and they are going to fall apart into some sort of hell,
or are already there, staring with deadened eyes at the imminent Last Days,
each day feeling like their last.
Consider the medieval world: Scholastic theology spoke, among other
things, of the justice, omnipotence, and will of God. It drew heavily from
the Church Fathers, chiefly Augustine, and from Greek philosophers, chiefly
Aristotle. But by the time the theological explanation of the nature of God’s
justice filtered through to the masses (a sort of trickle-down theology), the
line between justice and caprice had become exceedingly thin. While
theologians expounded on the need to trust God—who could certainly be
trusted because he was certainly good—the ordinary Christian was hard
pressed to rid himself of the conviction that God was a rather capricious
being; that the devil was nearly as powerful (and sometimes more so); and
that the will of God could be bent by propitiation, especially through acts
of penance. You could never be too sure about anything, in spite of all the
“certainties.” Talk about stress, indeed.
And yet, the medieval theoretical construct of the world and the
universe was that of a well-ordered, rational system. All things had their place
in that orderly chain of being as links in the chain. And all things had
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correspondences, so that earthly government, for example, had its

correspondence in the heavenly government: Christ was the “liege lord,” the
saints were his “vassals,” the world was a “fief” given to him by his Father,
Christians were “sub-vassals,” Mary was his “Lady,” and so on. There were
also ranks of demons parallel to ranks of angels. One had not only guardian
angels, but also assigned demons. And the highest value in this world was
not love (as humanism would have it), but loyalty: personal loyalty, oaths
of fealty sworn for life, one’s word the measure of one’s honor, an ungloved
handshake more binding and sacred than a dozen written parchment
contracts signed in blood.
Orderly, reliable, chaotic, uncertain: this was the medieval world.
Human beings were only a part of a larger drama, usually caught in the
middle as prizes or victims of angels and devils. There was no telling what
God would do next, no way of being assured one was on the right road to
heaven (even though there was only one right road), no way of gauging
human influence in human and divine activities. Here are two short stories,
chosen because they are not in any way unusual, and because even on this
side of the Middle Ages, they have lost none of their flavor:
A certain abbot once told me of a man, who in a fit of anger

told his son to go to the devil, and immediately the devil seized
the lad and carried him off, so that he was no more seen.3
A woman, wishing to have a patron apostle, [drew St. Jude by

lots, as was the custom, but] she grew angry and put back his
name .... For she wished to have one of the well-known apostles,
such as St. John the Evangelist or the blessed James. In the night
he [Jude] appeared to her in a dream and upbraided her severely,
complaining that she had despised him, and had thrown him
[back]. Nor did he leave her, until blows had been added to his
words. For a whole year she lay paralyzed in her bed.4
Leaving literal truth aside, these are typical damned-if-you-do,

damned-if-you-don’t stories, amazingly illustrative of how it is with us in
the modern world: Say something thoughtless and sure enough, something
very bad happens. Try to better yourself with a higher-placed connection
and you get smacked.
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Heaven, hell, and earth—the point of intersection—may have been

organized along clearly hierarchical, corresponding planes, but that did not
preclude the possibility of their respective inhabitants coming and going.
The borders of these realms were indistinct; saints, angels, and demons were
equally present in all realms. Against the definitive clarity of dogma stood
the ambiguous multiplicity of experience. (The idea of the devil as Christ's
“shadow” was not admissible to medieval theology, yet religious experience
constantly attested to its psychological reality.) And though theology declared
that man was the subject of much saving effort on God’s part, experience
taught that man was merely caught in the middle, that he was only a medium
through which various divine beings carried on their drama, in a setting
much like the pre-Christian Greek world of conflicts between gods played
out in the human sphere. While Christian theology professes monotheism,
we would perceive medieval Christianity with greater psychological accuracy
if we viewed it as containing a Christian pantheon.
It was this fluidity of existence, this blurred perception of the “material”
world and the “spiritual” world, and the uneasy sensation that the world of
human beings was a battleground for the conflict between the forces of heaven
and hell, that kept medieval folk in a chronic state of irritability and worry.
Their world may have been less complicated than ours, but it was not an
easier world to live in.
Some comment on the nature of Christ as Judge is important. Since
our theme here is melancholy and its madnesses, and since one of those
madnesses is guilt and an oppressive sense of “sin,” the figure of Christ
looming in the background requires closer scrutiny.
Like that of the saints, like that of his Mother and his Father, the
behavior of the medieval Jesus often bordered on caprice. At times he
appeared as the divine counterpart of an earthly feudal lord. And though
all-powerful, he was notoriously slow to make up his mind. As ChiefJustice,
he had to consider each individual case in detail, and his judgments were
always made on the basis of legalistic considerations, with constant reference
to what had already been decreed in the Old Testament scriptures.
Built on the Roman theology of the Western Church Fathers, medieval
Christianity was a legalistic religion, based on the fundamental concepts of law,
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punishment (both permanent and remedial), and redress of grievances, along

with older ideas of propitiation, appeasement, and compensation for injury.
It is not unusual to find stories in the popular ecclesiastical literature
of the day that convey a courtroom atmosphere, in which Jesus, Satan, and
frequently a saint and/or Mary contribute their views on the disposition of
the poor soul whose case is being heard.5 There was never a guarantee that
a petitioner’s request would be granted, or that the decision would be made
in a timely manner. One monk, Eadmer, was prompted to write, “Sometimes
salvation is quicker if we remember Mary’s name than if we invoke the name
of the Lord Jesus.” The reason for this, he explains, is that, “Her Son is the
Lord and Judge of all men, discerning the merits of the individuals, hence
he does not at once answer anyone who invokes him, but does it only after
just judgment. But if the name of his Mother be invoked, her merits intercede
so that he is answered even if the merits of him who invokes her do not
deserve it.”6 This is another way of saying that while it takes some time for
Christ to weigh various legal aspects of a case, Mary’s instinctive mercy—
her unreflecting feeling—will cause her Son to regard only her own merits,
and grant a petition at once. It seems to have taken about the same amount
of time to prepare a legal brief then as it does now.
Christ the Judge stood on the other side of the scale that weighed the
worthiness of souls from the Mother of Mercy. But like her, he was easily
offended and not above petty spite. His act of redemption was seen less as a
gift of grace than as a demand for obedience. His position as Second Person
of the Trinity was not clearly defined; the identities and functions of the Three
Persons were confusing and overlapping. In popular medieval literature, Christ
is usually represented as stern and uncompromising. His rebuke may be lethal,
as the monk in this tale discovered:
The monk was always accustomed to sleep in church. One night

when he was sleeping as usual while the others were chanting,
the Crucified came down from the altar, aroused the sleeper, and
struck him with so much force upon the cheek that he died
within three days.7
Intimacy, love, and compassion were possible with God, but against
his role as Judge, these remained abstractions, or were transferred to Mary
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as active qualities and realities. Always and everywhere people were reminded
that the Judge at the last accounting
will be inexorably severe. He will not be influenced by fear, since

He is all-powerful, nor by bribes, since He is abundance itself,
nor by hate, since He is benevolence itself, nor by love, since
He is justice itself, nor by error, since He is wisdom itself. Against
His wisdom neither the pleading of advocates nor the sophisms
of philosophers nor the discourses of orators nor the tricks of
hypocrites will prevail.8
As we find the feminine figure of Dame Melancholy within the psychic

world of Saturn (as anima melancholia, soul of melancholy), so here too, only
Mary, Mother of Sorrows, can temper the judgmental, rigid, demanding
character of her Son, at the same time that she fully supports his decrees.
God was spirit, of no parentage; Mary was matter, of human parentage. “God
was Justice, Order, Unity, Perfection; ... The Mother was human, imperfect
... she alone was Favour, Duality, Diversity.”9 She completes the Godhead.10
So when we have offended Christ, we should first go to the

Queen of Heaven and offer her ... prayers, fasting, vigils, and
alms; then she, like a mother, will come between thee and Christ,
the father who wishes to beat us, and she will throw the cloak
of mercy between the rod of punishment and us, and soften the
king’s anger against us.11
The Son who is also “the father who wishes to beat us” shows us a
medieval image of the saturnine, unyielding senex, which appeared again later
as Freud’s stern superego. As the Middle Ages waned, despondency and
melancholy are the tones of its setting. Life is one long misfortune; happiness
is just as fearful as misery, since it may be easily lost. The world, says the
medieval French poet Deschamps, “is like an old man fallen into dotage.”12
A сеdiе can be imagined as an older, more austere first cousin of Dame

Melancholy. She, too, sits with head in hand, downcast; and she appears
more anguished, her pain more clearly etched in her face and in the harrowing
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slump of her body, the spark of creative possibility extinguished. She is Dame
Melancholy pushed to the brink of suicide, and thus to the medieval mind,
a figure of sin. Here is a case from the fourteenth century:
An aged nun, convinced she was reprobate, tried to drown herself

because a priest told her she would not be buried in consecrated
ground for her unbelief.
You see what misery can be produced by melancholia: this

woman had been brought up in the convent since childhood;
she was a virgin, chaste, devout, scrupulous and punctual in her
religious duties: I have been told by the prioress of the
neighboring convent that the girls educated by her were better
disciplined and more devout than any of the others. But God is
very pitiful, and makes trial of His elect in many ways, and I
cannot but believe, that He, who so mercifully delivered her from
drowning, will have regard to her former good works, and will
not suffer her to perish at the last.13
The medieval institution of monasticism in particular—designed to

be a refuge from the world, the flesh, and the devil—tended to breed a deadly
and dreaded condition of the very sort it was intended to protect against:
the condition known as acedie, the most dire melancholy.
“Monastic melancholy” was known from the early days of the Desert
Fathers. The monk Stagirius, ca. 380, for example, suffered from monastic
melancholy, just as did his later counterpart, that old nun of Caesarius’s story.
Stagirius’s melancholy took the form of nightmares, fits, disordered speech,
despair of salvation, heavy despondency, and an urge to commit suicide.
Stagirius grew more despondent and worsened in his affliction when he saw
others with the same condition cured by leaving the monastery—an
observation that should have prompted him to consider that his acedie was
likely caused by its cure.
St. John Chrysostom saw melancholy as a trial which could be made
comprehensible and tolerable by reasonable reflection. His advice to Stagirius
was this: “Thou canst overcome thy despondency if thou sayest thou hast
done nought that might justify it.”14 Now I ask you, Reader: does this sound
very satisfying or practical to you? Against even the most superficial,
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trivialized, popularized sort of psychological cliche, this shows up as

rationalization of the worst sort. All you have to do is think there’s no reason
to be so wretched, and misery will go away. A simple mind-trick. Tell a burglar
there is no reason for him to rob you and he will surely, immediately, stop.
Tell yourself that since you cannot think of anything you’ve done to deserve
accidents, natural disasters, or death, they will surely not happen, and definitely
not happen to you.
This view of Chrysostom’s denies that anything can be unconscious.
It is the same view that has been a basic assumption of most psychological
theories, which place highest value (intentionally or not) on cognitive
judgments at the expense of what may be other psychological necessities.
The view that all psychic life has a rational basis and is amenable to
“reasonable” correction and “logical” argument is a view from the brain, and
a mindless one at that. Here is the prejudice that equates sanity with
rationality and thus regards the “sane” psyche as “rational,” and which
considers the human faculty of reason not merely different from but superior
to “natural law.”
In short, if the soul is sick, it is the soul’s fault. This is an early medieval
idea, which is still alive and well in the frequently made assumption that if
you are a victim of any sort, it is your own fault. While this may not be
true, there is a perverse logic to it that makes it beguilingly convincing. It is
understandable why we cling to this prejudiced view of rationality as superior
and logical thought as the guarantor of sanity, because without it we would
not be “masters of our fate” and “captains of our souls.” Instead, we would
be passengers in a small boat in a vast psychic sea, carried along by deep,
invisible currents—and not always in the direction we think we want to or
ought to go.
Chrysostom regards melancholy as a trial, an affliction sent from God
to test and strengthen the “victim.” It was not only the Greeks who thought
of melancholy as the disease of heroes; Chrysostom, a Hellenist at heart, and
incidentally a brilliant orator (whose name means “golden-mouth”), now
makes melancholy a Christian affliction to be borne heroically. (It may be
pertinent to recall here that the English, who produced perhaps the most
complete literature on melancholy in later times, are also famous for their
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heroically stiff upper lip in the midst of trial and darkness.) Chrysostom’s
notion anticipates the “bootstrap” philosophy of melancholy, or the Christian
version of contemporary positive thinking, which keeps depression
condemned as “evil.” Today, we don’t take simple un-depressants,” or
“positives,” but we take “anti-depressants,” knowing that “depression” is the
Enemy from Hell. Anti-depressants are our modern articles or capsules of
faith. And we have lost the medieval idea that melancholy should be regarded
as a visitation from God to restore one to a proper humility and correct the
great sin of pride.
Apart from whether the medieval approach is effective or not, there is
still dignity in Chrysostom’s view of melancholy, in that it does recall the
old Greek idea of melancholy as a madness, or an affliction from God. (I am
less concerned here with what sort of god this might be than with the divine
source of the affliction.) In Chrysostom’s view, melancholy, while a painful
condition, has the dignity of purpose or meaning. A few hundred years later,
William ofAuvergne conferred upon melancholy an even greater appreciation
by calling it a grace. The old Aristotelian notion that the melancholic
temperament produces great intellects, contemplatives, philosophers, scholars
and poets was interpreted by William within the Christian framework to
mean that the melancholic temperament was most excellent and fitting for
the life of asceticism and monastic contemplation.15
Both Chrysostom and William share the view that melancholy is from
God, either as a test, or as a grace. These are, in some sense, the same,
although Chrysostom sees melancholy more as an affliction while William
sees it as a gift bestowed at birth.
But melancholy lost its dignity and depth when it became identified
with theology’s too-narrow definition and with the too-shallow popular
understanding of acedie that later came to identify it as merely “sloth.” Once
so identified, melancholy/acedie became a vice, a sin, and the fault primarily
of the sufferer. You brought it on yourself, through your own spiritual neglect
or laziness. These days, melancholy/ “depression” is often attributed to lack
of concentration (too little “will power”), failure to adapt socially or take
advantage of social opportunities, failure to recognize or appreciate one’s own
“self-worth,” and so on. There is a circularity of thinking about depression:
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the symptoms are also imagined as the cause. This may account for
conventional psychotherapy’s insistence on treating symptoms, since no real
distinction has been made between symptom and cause.
St. Hildegard of Bingen (twelfth century) was a remarkable woman
whose accomplishments and range of productive interests must have
astonished, or at least offended, her contemporaries. She was a German
Benedictine nun, an administrator, mystic, visionary, physician, poet,
scientist, playwright, ascetic, radical, and saint. Even in our modern age of
high-speed technology and multi-tasking, it is hard for one person to be all
these at once. Among other things, Hildegard wrote a book on clinical
medicine called Causes and Cures. She emphasized the tragic conception of
melancholy, relating the origin of the melancholy humor (the black bile) to
the Fall of Man. Indeed, her conception of melancholy consists of not only
the actual illness of melancholy and the temperament of melancholy (which
she thought most unfavorable), but also practically all the imperfections and
dysfunctions of humanity since the expulsion from Paradise. Had Adam not
sinned, mankind would have been free of all “harmful humors.” But because
of Adam’s fall, man became
sad and timid and constant in mind, so that there is no right

constitution or bearing in them. ... A humor springs in them
... generating the melancholy which was born in the first fruit
of Adam’s seed out of the breath of the serpent when Adam
followed its advice by devouring the apple. For at the same
moment that Adam sinned in taking the apple, melancholy
curdled in his blood .... [Before Adam fell], what is now gall in
him sparkled like crystal, and bore the taste of good works, and
what is now melancholy in man shone in him like the dawn; but
when Adam broke the law, ... his gall was changed to bitterness
and his melancholy to blackness.16
Hildegard’s conception of melancholy as a tragic condition recalls the

ancient idea of melancholy as a divine punishment in the form of madness
with symptoms of physical illness. The difference is that Hildegard replaces
the older idea of individual, single offenses against the gods with the Christian
idea of universal original sin. Thus, what had been an individual tragedy
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now becomes the inevitable tragedy of all humanity—and that through its
own disobedience. So there was no consolation for melancholy, and no moral
excuse for it. “Melancholy was once and for all the poena Adae [punishment
of Adam] and had to be borne by the whole race . ...”17 And although a
physician could relieve the worst symptoms, the illness could never be
completely cured or eradicated, as it was hereditarily transmitted, essentially
evil, and spiritually inevitable owing to the exile from Eden.
Hildegard’s view of melancholy makes it a fundament of the human
condition, normal in its universality even though burdensome. And we need
not agree with Hildegard’s theology in all points to appreciate, with her, the
tragic sense of life that is inherent in the melancholic condition. She
anticipates by several centuries William James’s pessimistic attitude and what
he calls the “sick soul,” and though they reach different conclusions about
the origin and nature of this “sickness,” both find that melancholy is best
understood and appreciated in religious terms. For Hildegard, we are frail
creatures because, through Adam’s fall from grace, we lack moral strength
and thus incur the dark shadow of melancholia through disobedience. For
James, we are frail creatures because life is precarious and always in some
sense tragic in ways we cannot avoid. But Hildegard, bound much more
closely to the theology of the medieval Catholic world, could not fully accept
the tragic sense of life, and the melancholy it induces, without denying the
efficacy and joy of Christ’s redemptive act. James, however, and others in
that later Romantic tradition, understood very well Alexander Pope’s lines:
“... To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;/... For this the Tragic Muse
first trod the stage.”18
hough no one with such a name ought to be trusted, Pope Innocent
T III (thirteenth century) gave us his useful description of acedie. In his

little book, Instructio, he says of the person afflicted with acedie: “He relishes
neither earthly nor spiritual joy ... he has no regret for the heavenly life which
he has let slip through carelessness, nor does he fear the pain of Hell which
is being prepared for him.”19 You will notice in this definition that, as with
all sins, there is an assumption of collusion between the sinner and his
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condition, a clear placing of blame: acedie is thought to be the result of

carelessness, an unwarranted lapse of consciousness or alertness. It is
essentially a state of desperate boredom with the spiritual life, and thus not
far from the blasphemous state of being bored with God himself.
“During the first 1200 years after Christ the idea of the highly gifted
melancholic had apparently been completely forgotten.”20 The worth of an
individual came to reside not in intellectual gifts and capacities, but in moral
virtues and spiritual piety. Thomas Aquinas, who gave us the definitive
analysis of acedie, calls it a special vice, “sorrow in the Divine good ...”.21
Acedie is “the sorrow or aversion against God himself and the things that
are directly related to Him. It is the opposite of joy in the divine good that
man should experience. Thus, acedie is indeed a special vice, and is opposed
to spiritual gaudiam [joy] ....”22
Acedie is thus not an “external” nor even observable condition; Aquinas
makes it clear that the sin lies not in being sorry because one is forced to do
acts of virtue, but in being sorry to do it for God’s sake. Thus, it is especially a
sin directed against God, or “the Divine Good,” different in this respect from
other sins that may be considered indirect, as they are offenses against other
persons or oneself. So the essence ofthe sin lies not in the act ofdoing (or not doing)
something, but rather in the person for whom the act is done (or not done).
While Aquinas the theologian was carefully differentiating acedie from
“sorrow,” “sullenness,” and related sins, the popular understanding of acedie
was shifting: it began to be seen less as a state of mind (taedium) than as
observable behavior. It was called “idleness in the service of God.” This was
the medieval version of what we would now call the behavioral view of
depression. The externalization of acedie emphasized the numerous
observable faults resulting from such a state of mind (the symptoms), rather
than the emotion of disgust and aversion for the divine good (the sickness).
As with modern behaviorism, the emphasis was on what was seen and could
be treated rather than on the underlying cause, intent, purpose, or pattern
(which could not be seen and thus remained hidden, i.e., unknown, and
consequently, non-existent.)
In terms of the theory of humors, acedie is a condition of dryness,
dehydration of the moisture necessary for the life of body and soul. As the
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body dries out, so the soul dries up, turns black, wants to die. The aged nun
who thought she was a reprobate seems to have wanted to kill herself less
because she was old and a blight on the world than because her world had
turned black and dried up with despair. The terrible reality of acedie is not
that you’ve lost your faith, but that you don’t care that you’ve lost your faith.
This is a very different condition from, and far more deadly than, one of
the modern twenty-first-century diagnoses that could be applied to that nun,
such as narcissistic personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive masochism,
serious lack of self-esteem, poor or distorted self-image, major affective
disorder, sexual deprivation (or neglect of Venus, as Burton would say), or
that too much of her natural vitality has been repressed. Even the grander,
nobler Jungian terms sound hollow in the face of her desperation: that she
is suffering from a philosophical neurosis and needs to find a new relationship
to the larger, greater, Self. All of these may be factors. But I believe that, to
her horror, she came to the same realization as Ecclesiastes before her, that
“all is vanity,” there is nothing new under the sun, and all the labor and
aspirations of the soul are but strivings after wind. If one knows this, how
can one not be rendered utterly desolate and despairing?
Beginning in the thirteenth century, acedie became known to Everyman
as neglect in the performance of spiritual duties, and it became Everyman’s
vice. It was synonymous with spiritual idleness or indolence. “The essence
of this popular form of the sin is weariness, torpor, or plain laziness ... in
performing spiritual acts.”23 Aquinas did not include these attitudes as
belonging to the sin of acedie. But the popular view “carries a heavy emphasis
on the physical and considers acedie a bodily vice, a sin of the flesh.”24 Once
popularized, acedie became trivialized. What had once been a grievous
affliction of possibly great souls, a painfully deep suffering of despair, became
an ordinary sin, viewed merely as a superficial, behavioral defect, diminished and
reduced from the truly mortal to the merely venial.
From emphasizing the bodily nature of acedie it is only a short step to
claiming that it can be brought under control by marshalling the powers of
the mind. Christianity has always sought to bring the body into submission
to the mind. In the Middle Ages, a number of spiritual disciplines were
employed to try to counteract the obstinacy of mind or sluggishness of spirit
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that resulted from laziness of body. Medieval folk, apparently, were as

behavioristic as we are, believing that acedie could be overcome simply by
changing behavior: pray more, give more alms, do good works, go on a
pilgrimage, visit the sick. The idea was to get out of the rut by getting out
of the rut. And there may have been some reason to feel a little better if you
noticed that there is always someone else who is worse off than yourself, an
observation that could cheer you and lift you out of acedie-, but more likely
it would backfire and drive you into deeper despair. Where do you go if the
grass is browner on the other side of the fence?
Today we employ a number of therapeutic modalities designed to
generate “good works” and/or thoughts to overcome acedie, but they are, in
fact, the same spiritual disciplines cast in secular terms. Most favored these
days is not the medieval practice of fasting and prayer (although we do have
a lot of dieting and meditating), but cognitive behavior therapy. The basic
assumption and approach is the same: correct the mind (thinking patterns)
and you will help (discipline, subdue) the actual behavior of the body. One
does this by eliminating “destructive” or “negative” thought patterns, which
is a form of mental fasting, and replacing these patterns with “positive” or
“constructive” thought patterns (or, in abbreviated form, “affirmations”),
which may be considered a form of prayer. Just exactly what constitutes
“positive” thought content is canonically decided by prevailing cultural
norms, whether these are pathological in themselves or not. (With admitted
facetious intent, I recall here an old mantra: “Every day in every way I’m
getting better and better.” And the unforgettable inspirational poem: “Good,
better, best, never let it rest, ’til your good is better, and your better, best.”)
In short, when you fix your head and get it straight, your behavior will align
itself accordingly and you will act and feel “appropriately ” and will not want
to drown yourself like a crazy old nun.
Once you begin to think in mind-over-matter terms, you are in a
moralistic stance, very like the medieval churchmen. The attitude is, basically,
that the ego’s failure has caused the “depression” somehow, usually through
a moral failure, a failure of will, or nerve, or backbone, or ascetic strength,
or lack of discipline or focus, or unwillingness to “make a commitment.”
The judgment or condemnation of God falls on the ego in the form of a
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crushing depression, with its familiar symptomatology: guilt, sorrow, sense

of loss.
Acedie: Despair ofPsychological Work
All clinicians and most professionals know about burn-out.

Psychologists have all sorts of preventatives and remedies for burn-out,
emphasizing avoidance of undue stress and emotional depletion (“make sure
your own needs are met,” “take August off,” etc.).
But acedie is not about burn-out. Acedie is to burn-out as suicide is to
a broken leg. It can be fatal, not merely incapacitating. In psychological terms,
acedie is a condition of the soul in which its desire and delight in itself, in
its own work of fashioning images to know itself, has turned sour or even
disgusting. (Remember Aquinas defining acedie as sorrow or aversion to the
Divine Good.) This is not “low self-esteem” in the limited sense of self
recrimination over one’s ego failures or limitations. This is a far deeper, and
far more deadly, Stygian aversion to soul, an aversion to depth, and to the
careful attention and ethos the soul requires for its self-knowledge.
This sort of acedie may occur in analysts and psychotherapists who have
a real vocation to the work, a true calling to attend the soul. Indeed, those
with an authentic vocation are more “at risk” for this kind of acedie than
those who take it less seriously, aspire to less, and see their work more as a
“secular” career or job than as an internal movement of fate, or as the necessity
of being true to their own character. It occurs also in musicians and poets
whose music and poems are birthed into being through desperate suffering,
failure, and sometimes an inability to sustain even modest contentment, let
alone joy.
In a sense, these people are the modern monastics, sensual lovers of
soul, who yet personify a most austere devotion to their art. Theirs is not
always a noble dedication, sometimes more the dumb labor of a mule
turning a millwheel. And they are not a cloistered lot, by and large; their
occupation of caring for soul ranges widely through the imaginal and
material worlds. Duke Ellington, who wrote some of the most melancholy
jazz music, was very much a man of the world, while Emily Dickinson rarely
left her house.
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The despair that sets in, the aversion to one’s deepest life and often to
one’s art or greatest gift, an aversion for the deepest and most valuable
experiences, work, and self-knowledge—this is essentially an aversion to soul
work, or to psyche/therapeia (“caring for,” “attending to,” soul). This is not
just the ego’s aversion, or a tired consciousness, or burn-out, or too many
therapy sessions per week (although these contribute). It is, rather, a
despairing conviction in one’s deepest being that there is no point to the work,
since it has lost its dimension of destiny. And this conviction is quite apart
from the felt certainty that one is not fit to do it. There is no Eros, no desire,
no love, no interest, no purpose, no meaning.
This does not mean aversion to one’s patients or clients; it means rather
an aversion to the work one is called to do with them, which is also
simultaneously a work with oneself. And this is really not that different from
work on a poem, which changes the poet. The disgust is not for a person,
but for psychological work. And yet, if melancholy drives one to the depths
of acedie, it may happen that a psychotherapist does her/his best work when
laboring under this affliction. This is a paradox that may contain a partial
solution to the frequent clinical problem of “countertransference”: since acedie
tends to dry up fantasies of hope, the therapist works without expecting
transformation, change, progress, betterment, improvement—like a mule,
head down, plodding—-and so he or she may be less likely to interfere with
or impede the client’s process. Remember the pronouncement to new arrivals
at the gates of Dante’s Hell: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”25
But this sort of acedie, or dire melancholy, is not to be overcome with
virtue (caring, sharing, love) as if it were a vice, for to attempt to do so would
be to put acedie back into moralistic terms and thus lose the sense of deep,
desperate affliction. When one labors in this condition, one lives depressively,
sees the world from that heavy dark underside of experience, moves slowly,
thinks slowly, and lives at a depth at which one can reach the other person’s
acedie—not Jung’s “transcendent function,” but the descendent attitude. The
gravity of Saturn—too strong for earthlings to stand against—pulls one down
into his reality, and then one sees the world through his eyes—a view that
includes defeat and the destruction of those things that must be broken down:
pride, illusions, and not least, false hope.
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A caution, lest we become either too judgmental or suicidal: acedie

in the modern therapist is a very interior, even private, affliction. And
because it is an attitude toward one’s work, it often goes unrecognized.
For it is in the nature of Saturn to make all problems and difficulties appear
overwhelmingly large and to have them manifested in the concrete form of
the material world, so that the therapist’s despair may appear in an exterior
form: for example, the patient who simply will not and cannot be made to
pay the bill or come on time (saturnine behavior); the patient who constantly
resists self-reflection; the patient who, as if sent by the medieval God himself,
chronically keeps testing the therapist’s “faith” with threats of suicide,
homicide, malpractice suits. Anything, or anyone, that will not move, change,
improve, progress—that is Saturn, and that is the therapist’s acedie, and that
is what drives him or her to despair.
So therapists and analysts may go on doing very good work and being
well-thought of (like the nun of good repute who did such outstanding
educating of her young charges), and still be convinced somewhere that they
are psychological reprobates. The alchemical experience is the same: an
aversion to the work that makes one sick, or may even kill, and yet an inability
to stop. Some alchemists spent years in their damp, cramped, smelly
laboratories, broken in both health and pocket, writing long treatises on how
awful and desperate the work was, and how close to death they came so many
times; and still, they stayed, and kept writing and working and complaining,
driven less by hope than by sheer necessity. And some did, in fact, die from,
or for, the work.
When Eros Leaves
There is an old tale in Greek mythology of how Psyche, the beautiful

mortal woman, is given to Eros, the divine son of Aphrodite, in marriage.
But she is forbidden to see her husband, who comes to her only in the night.
She falls in love with Eros in the darkness, hearing his soft, gentle whispers,
only guessing at what he might look like, but feeling in her body his
tenderness and desire. One night, unable to resist, she lights an oil lamp to
see his face—for the soul always wants to look upon and know what it loves—
and is overwhelmed by his breathtaking perfection. But in so doing, she spills
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a drop of hot oil on his shoulder; he awakes with a cry and flees from her,
leaving her inconsolable with grief and remorse.
Aphrodite, jealous of Psyche’s rivaling beauty and disapproving of the
match from the beginning, agrees to help Psyche find Eros, but only after
Psyche has completed four tasks, each more difficult than the one before.
Yet, driven by her unwavering love for Eros, and with help from various
quarters, Psyche performs all that is required of her, and at the end, when she
fails in the final task, Eros, whose love is equal to hers, comes to her rescue;
they are reunited, and Zeus grants Psyche immortality. From their mating
comes a daughter, named Pleasure (Voluptas).
The story has a happy ending. But to get to the end, one first has to
go through it, and it is this middle ground—the realization of loss, the
discovery that what has been wounded is one’s own desire—in which one is
most vulnerable to despair. For when Eros leaves, we have no way of knowing
whether there will be a happy ending or not. Like Psyche, we have only
impossible tasks to perform, and each day a little more hope disappears.
When Eros leaves, he takes the heart with him. Without the erotic
sensibility he confers, the delight in the sensual world, the love he inspires,
and the desire he instills—for he is, himself, a potent mix of all these—the
heart fails. It is not that one’s heart is broken, but that it has been lost. Now
there is just an empty space where the heart used to be, and one has no heart
for anything.
The apathy that characterizes deep melancholy, which is also a form
of acedie, can be imagined as the loss of Eros, the spark of divinity that enables
us to feel connected to the world and other people, and to some core sense
of self. Feelings of being unrelated, “cut off,” “disconnected,” signify the
departure of Eros. With Psyche, we are bereft. The soul has lost its desire,
and its love.
The way one survives such loss is by doing what is required, even
though one is unable. The tasks Aphrodite assigns to Psyche are tedious
(separating a huge pile of tiny mixed grains), dangerous (she must bring back
a hank of wool from a flock of man-killing sheep), life-threatening (she must
bring a jar of water from the deadly river Styx as it falls from a terrifying
precipice), and finally, impossible: she is to go to Persephone, Queen of the
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Underworld, and return with a box of her beauty ointment. If she fails at
this last task, she will fall into a deathlike sleep and never leave the lightless
Underworld. And she does, indeed, fail at the last, being overcome by the
wish to make herself beautiful for Eros, for whom she is searching, and it is
Eros who finally finds Psyche and awakens her to life again.
It is just this middle part of the story—the performing of impossible tasks
when one has lost heart—that gives us some mythic ground to fall on. We
cannot know the ending of the story—if there is one. Much of the time passed
in the darkest blue-black melancholy is spent in the middle of a story, full of
remorse, grief, desolation, haunting memories. And in this middle, there is
nothing else to do but what is necessary, putting one foot in front of the other,
head down, breathing slowly, one small thing at a time. Demands and cries
for a sense of purpose, meaning, direction—these are useless and belong to a
different story, a story of heroism, or great missions, or difficult journeys. The
middle of the story of Psyche’s loss of Eros consists of nothing more than the
doing of things even when they seem impossible, and made to seem the more
so by the knowledge that they are being inflicted as a punishment, the cruel
punishment that Aphrodite inflicts on the suffering Psyche.
In this mythic story, it is the return of desire (Eros) that rescues the
soul (Psyche) from its suicidal despair. But there is no way to hurry or force
this return, no way to willfully resurrect the erotic desire that animates the
world and makes it a desirable place to live in. There is nothing to do but
remember that one is in the middle of the story, and to wait. And wait ....
In the twilight of waiting, listen for the music playing in the
background of this eternal story, the slow, softly plaintive blues number,
written by Duke Ellington and sung by Billie Holiday, called “Solitude”.
In my solitude
You haunt me
With dreadful ease
Ofdays gone by
In my solitude
You taunt me
With memories
That never die
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I sit in my chair
And filled with despair
There’s no one could be so sad
With gloom everywhere
I sit and I stare
I know that I’ll soon go mad
In my solitude
I’m afraid
Dear Lord above
Send me back my love.
SCENE: New Jersey, 1947

A Tale ofDame Melancholy’s Sister: Portrait ofAunt Helen
y Aunt Helen, born in 1911, married a handsome, ambitious, on-the-
M way-up lawyer. They had an adorable, lively daughter, Carol, who,

like her mother, showed early signs of being bright and talented, and who
by age seven had a wickedly precocious sense of humor. Helen was the second
oldest of four children, the first girl. My mother was her sister, younger by
two years.
When I was growing up, no one in the family ever spoke of Aunt Helen.
It was almost as if she never existed. Even my cousin Carol, her beautiful
daughter, never talked about her—at least, not to me, and we were closer
than sisters when we were young. My family was like millions of other
families, who also had their secrets and who believed that no one suspected
they did. What happened to Helen was a shame, an unspeakable shame from
which the whole family suffered and from which the family never recovered.
When I became an adult and learned more about my Aunt Helen, I
realized that the family seemed to feel much more shame for themselves
than compassion for her. There was bitterness, blame, and mostly silence,
the hallmarks of a still-unhealed wound. It was as if Helen’s despair had
contaminated everyone who had known her, leaving them to carry the
despair for decades after she herself had gone. It was her fault, her cowardice.
The only time my mother ever spoke of her, she made it clear, with her
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mouth set in a harsh line and her voice cold and low, that Helen was
not the only one who had had a hard time during the war. And that, I
surmised, was my mother’s whole and unforgiving explanation for how
Helen was.
Helen, like her namesake of Troy, was beautiful. Her hair was a rich
chestnut, her body slim and graceful, her eyes a soft brown that yet reflected
a disturbing depth of pain. She was somewhat shy and introverted, quite
the opposite of my mother, to whom all of life was, or should have been, a
dance party with Glenn Miller music. In the few existing old photographs
of Helen, her smile is weak and a little sad.
To all appearances Helen was refined, cultivated, a loving mother, well-
matched with her husband Jack. She had, as the cliche goes, everything to
live for.
But, as always, there was the other side, the underside of Helen’s life.
She fell into periodic bouts of crushing depression. Each time she was
hospitalized, and each time for a longer period. She was given medications.
Jack and his sisters took care of Carol, and my mother helped out. When
Helen went to the hospital, we, the children, were told Aunt Helen was “very
sick,” and since she was in a hospital, we assumed her illness was entirely
physical and it was merely a matter of time before she would be well. I don’t
know what my cousin Carol thought, since she was two whole years older
than I was, but I thought in my seven-year-old clear-sighted way that Aunt
Helen had something like mumps or an especially bad cold.
Helen was her mother’s darling, but her mother could never be pleased.
There were religious problems: her mother was an Orthodox Jew, but Helen
was not able to be sufficiently orthodox to satisfy her, and Jack was not
observant at all, being an assimilated man educated in the culture of secular
America. She should have been an artist, having shown a recognizable talent
even in childhood, but the conventions of the time saw value only in her
potential maternity, not in her artistry, and the only masterpieces she was
expected to produce were children. The post-World War II years in New
Jersey were painful for the extended family: too many brothers and cousins
killed in combat; the branch of the family that had remained in Europe wiped
152
out in the Holocaust. Helen was known in the family as “the sensitive
one,” the one who felt things more deeply, suffered more piercingly, carried
the drama of the whole family in that tragically beautiful, sorrowful smile.
Everyone was relieved when Jack failed to be classified as A-l by the
draft board and remained at home. As Helen was beautiful and had a fine
delicacy about her, so Jack was handsome and solidly built, tall, his hair black
and thick, his jaw so chiseled it suggested belligerence. But he was not an
easy man to live with: demanding, short-tempered, given to outbursts of
dark rage that terrorized all who saw it. He was steel to Helen’s porcelain,
he engulfed her by his towering presence, his sexuality was more menacing
than seductive, and he believed that hard discipline was the best expression
of love.
The last time Aunt Helen went to the hospital was the longest she
stayed there, nearly nine months. When she came out, the doctors must have
thought she was better—or perhaps they, too, had become infected with her
despair and given up. No one really knows what anguish Helen suffered,
what drove her to such profound despair, or why life was so empty or cruel
or painful for her. No one could ever reconcile the contradiction between
how things appeared and how they really were, and probably Helen couldn’t
either. Had she lived six hundred years earlier she might have sought help
and comfort in the quiet walls of a convent, but, being who she was, the
demon of acedie would have found her hiding there and claimed her anyway.
For some, there is a hard fate, and for those, there are things worse than death.
In April of 1947, when Helen was thirty-six years old, she went home
from the hospital for the last time. A few days later, she turned on the gas
oven in her kitchen, stuck her head in it, and died.
Some might say she lost her battle with acedie-, indeed, my family
seemed to think she failed. But I prefer to think that her real legacy, her gift
to me, which is apparent now more than ever as I sit and write these words,
was not that she lost a battle, but that she fought nobly and long. And I
prefer also to think not that she lost, but that she knew when to stop.
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CHAPTER TEN
Pessimism and Religious Melancholy
Our eyes register the light of dead stars.
—Andre Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just'
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets2

hat all things pass away, and that all remains the same, is the
T lesson from the ancients, and is the double-pillared foundation

of the romantic’s agony, and of what William James calls
“radical pessimism.”
As we move into this kind of pessimism, it is important to remember
that the word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, meaning “root.”
While it carries the sense of extremism in modern usage, horizontally to
the “radical right” or “extreme left,” it also means a direct move
downward, to the root. There is a deep connection between nostalgia and
spiritual despair, and between nostalgia and melancholy as a religious
attitude toward life: an attitude of pessimism though not morbidity, an
attitude that is rooted in a harshly realistic view of life without being
necessarily defeatist.
There are two temperaments, says James in The Varieties of Religious
Experience. The “healthy-minded temperament, the temperament which has
a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering,”3 is the temperament that
we call the quintessential optimist, the sanguine person who is always able
and prefers to look on the bright and sunny side of life. The yellow “smiley
face,” American icon of the late twentieth century, was invented in 1963 by
Harvey Ball, a man of sanguine generosity. He was paid a mere $45 for his
design. He never applied for a copyright or trademark, and decades later said,
smiling, that he never regretted not doing so.
What James calls “the sick soul,” by contrast, is the melancholic
temperament of those “who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the
consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence.”4
According to the theory of humors, the sanguine and melancholic
temperaments are incompatible with each other. So too, according to James,
the optimistic “healthy-minded” view of life is opposed to the pessimistic
view of life of the “sick soul.”
There are people for whom evil means only a maladjustment

with things, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the
environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least,
upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self
or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit,
and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others
for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer
things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or
vice in his essential nature, which no alteration ofthe environment,
or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self can cure, and
which requires a supernatural remedy.5 [Italics mine]
Hildegard of Bingen would find a kindred thinker in James, if not a

brother theologian. What Hildegard recognized in theological terms as
original sin, James confirms in psychological terms as the sense of something
“wrong” in one’s essential nature.
James himself was a melancholic, and in his study of the two contrary
temperaments, he found, not surprisingly, the greater value, profundity and
complexity in the melancholic or pessimistic view. The real question becomes,
not how to stop worrying or stop being pessimistic, but: how can one
realistically be anything else? The old medieval view of the world as cloudy
and unpredictable still echoes in James, as in the following passage:
... How can things so insecure as the successful experiences of

this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than
its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and
most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and
disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom
of every fountain of pleasure ... something bitter rises up: a touch
of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy,
things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring
a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an
appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch
as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls on it.6
James, who turned fifty-nine as the nineteenth century became the

twentieth, lived in a world where there were more than enough miseries and
hardships to make one melancholic well before World War I, World War II,
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PESSIMISM AND RELIGIOUS MELANCHOLY
the Death Camps, the Bomb, and world-wide terrorist networks. If optimism
was indefensible then, it should have disappeared from the list of options
by this time.
James summarizes the condition of “world-sickness” that comes on as
one moves farther past the misery-threshold: “All natural goods perish. Riches
take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure
vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the real
goods which our souls require? Back of everything is the great spectre of
universal death, the all-encompassing blackness . ...”7
The melancholy pessimist is always a child of Saturn at the core, no
matter how genuine and frequent are the moments (and there may be many
long moments indeed) of joy and contentment. Once we begin to “cool
down,” as James says, and lose some of our “animal excitability and instinct,
a little loss of animal toughness,” we begin a descent to the core of our being.
In this descent, which is the direction of aging, that of which we are truly
and centrally and essentially made comes into fuller view, and there is no
guarantee that it will be pure light and sparkling beauty. “The pride of life
and the glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel
of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic
look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.”8
James finds that pessimism is rooted in an experience of oneself as
hopelessly “sinful,” but not only in the specific sense of “sin” in the
Christian schema, as the fall from a state of innocence and humankind’s
consequent need for redemption. The sense of “wrongness” that “sin”
suggests is not entirely, or purely, of a moral kind (although it includes
that); it includes also a larger awareness that something in the way the world
operates, “the system,” is fundamentally wrong too: wrong in the sense of
cosmic disharmony, failure in an impersonal sense, and also “wrong” in
the deeply felt sense of incompleteness and the inability to make anything
truly whole.
The Christian view places the origin of sin within the human, and it
is from this general context that James writes. But the attitude of radical
pessimism originates in something deeper than the free will which is the
biblical source of humankind’s original sin. “For this extremity of pessimism
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to be reached, something more is needed than observation of life and reflection

upon death. The individual must in his own person become the prey of a
pathological melancholy.”9
Observation and reflection alone do not convince. (“Convince,” from
the Latin, means literally “to put in chains.”) But the experience ofand through
one's own pathology is convincing. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is not enough;
a change of mind is not even close to enough; your whole emotional subjective
soul must be engaged, convinced, chained to the reality of its suffering.
This is what transforms intellectual doctrine into the passion of a
convinced soul. James is not being melodramatic when he says the remedy
must be “supernatural.”
The convincing experience of one’s own “soul sickness” forces one,
pragmatically, to find another way of being, if life is to continue at all. The
old, “healthy-minded” way doesn’t work any more—if it ever did. One knows
and has been through too much.
The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living

simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It
will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than
most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its
successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a
religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as
melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from
melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness
is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts
which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion
of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s
significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the
deepest levels of truth.10
James distinguishes between “pathological melancholy” and “religious

melancholy” (as Burton called it long ago and as we will call it now).
“Pathological melancholy” is what we today call “agitated depression,” with
all the old familiar symptoms of insomnia, loss of appetite, impoverished
thought and imagination, lack of concentration, feelings of guilt, and sorrow.
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“Religious melancholy” is not a set of symptoms but a philosophy, a world

view that arises out of the individual’s experience of the world.
The religious task then is to affirm the authenticity of one's subjective
experience, no matter how shadowed it may be. The way out of “pathological
melancholy” is into “religious melancholy,” a deeper and more complex
understanding of the human condition and the world in which we live. And
precisely because the formation of such a world-view leads one deeper into
one’s roots, the more radical one’s pessimism tends to become. As James saw
it, the movement from a “once-born” innocent condition to the experience
of oneself as a “sick soul,” that is, the movement from pathological to religious
melancholy, is what he calls a “process of redemption.”11
The entire value system on which the individual’s life has been built
changes in this “process of redemption.” The loss of those values-—many of
them given through culture, society, religion, family—begins the descent,
in fact, makes the descent both possible and necessary. All the tortured
questions of meaning explode into consciousness: “Why?” “Why me?” “What
is this for?” “What does this mean?” “What next?” Tolstoy suffered this
complete breakdown, and though he did not wish to commit suicide, he
noted that “the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful,
more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to
live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of
my whole being to get out of life.”12
When one suffers such a loss of meaning, of values, when one has
been so impelled to death and aspires to get out of life, one cannot expect
that a return to “health” will be merely a restoration of the way things were
before. Such expectation sees “health” as “what you were used to,” “the
familiar.” And significantly, it is often in the status quo that the origin of
the “sickness” is to be found. The “redemption” James speaks of comes “by
what seems ... a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than [one]
could enjoy before.”13
Modern psychology’s preoccupation with symptoms of depression, its
attitude of expediency, and its reliance on drugs in “treating” depression show
an appalling superficiality in the face of real human suffering. The refusal
of psychiatry, certainly, and psychology in general, to regard depression as
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authentic melancholy, as one of James’s varieties of religious experience—

apart from whatever else it might be—is demeaning to the sufferer and
perpetrates a violence against a soul that is already in torment.
How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and
intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help
like this! Here is the real core of a religious problem: Help! Help!
No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things
that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these.
But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the
complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the
coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles
and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced.14
Science is the religion of our time, with psychology one of its sects.
And with psychology’s vapid, cultic jargon and love of diagnostic litanies,
its apotropaic incense of a thousand drugs, it proves James right: we would
do far better with more coarseness, more “blood,” more intensity, more
passion, more depth. These are the best antidotes to the deadening civilized
structures and conventions that pass for both organized religion and
professional psychology. We would do well to have a psychology of aspiration,
of fervor for the soul (which is its proper subject), of poetry, of serious and
loving attention—a real therapy of the psyche. Like the less coarse, more
“civilized” religions, psychology has been stripped of its Venusian sensuality,
its blood-pulse and life-force, and thus the soul’s great sufferings have been
trivialized. It understands the soul’s need for redemption and great sacrificial
dramas only in terms of wafer-thin concepts, its applications approved by
clerks in insurance companies, who stare at computer monitors, following
the cursor as if it were the finger of God pointing the way to salvation.
For the sake of melancholics who look to it for help, psychology should
turn to the ancient Lord of Souls, Dionysus, who stands for everything Saturn
fears: orgiastic driving of blood, the relentless pulse of life and sexual heat.
Dionysus is a bisexual god who knows in his own divine being the madness
and necessity of descent, the torment of abandonment and dismemberment,
and the profoundly melancholic sorrow of realizing that he is, as we are,
always an Outcast.
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Religious melancholy is, at its core, a stark, raw condition of

inconsolable grief. Life is lived as if one were an exposed nerve; life is pain.
One may indeed feel profound pleasure, but still be unable to turn away
from pain. The heart works, but is forever broken. For the melancholic,
there is endurance of suffering and its grief, and often much meaning to
be found therein. There is occasional hope, but not much expectation; or
there is madness, or death. But no cure.
The religious melancholic need not magnify pain and suffering, it is
already great enough; the fateful calling is to witness and endure one’s own,
and often that of others. There is a Jewish tradition that tries to understand
how a world so full of pain and anguish is able to continue. It is a living
tradition, for those men and women who embody it are among us now. It is
the Legend of the Just Men, but women are also included, and at any given
time there are thirty-six of them in the world. The world rests upon them,
these thirty-six, the Lamed-Vov as they are called. They are
indistinguishable from simple mortals; often they are unaware

of their station. But if just one of them were lacking, the
sufferings of mankind would poison even the souls of the
newborn, and humanity would suffocate with a single cry. For
the Lamed-Vov are the hearts of the world multiplied, and into
them, as into one receptacle, pour all our griefs. ... The most
pitiable are the Lamed-Vov who remain unknown to themselves.
For those the spectacle of the world is an unspeakable hell. ...
“When as unknown Just rises to Heaven,” a Hasidic story goes,
“he is so frozen that God must warm him for a thousand years
between His fingers before his soul can open itself to Paradise.
And it is known that some remain forever inconsolable at human
woe, so that God Himself cannot warm them. So from time to
time the Creator, blessed be His name, sets forward the clock
of the Last Judgment by one minute.”15
What Goes Up (in mood) Must Come Down (in reality)
Christianity introduced a particular set of moral categories, so that in

the Western world it is difficult to see the saturnine temperament of
melancholy through any other than Christianity’s lens. It has always seemed
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strange to me that a theology so concerned with sin, guilt, atonement,

suffering, and death would be hostile to a melancholic outlook on life. Of
course, when you add resurrection from the dead, you get a major clue: this
story has a happy ending. As spiritual despair, acedie negated the hope of
eternal life held out by the Resurrection and thus constituted a most terrible
sin: you were expected to bury your melancholy in the tomb with Jesus and
live faithfully in the hope of rising to glory at the last day.
But the psychological resemblance between Christianity’s God and old
Saturn is still too close to be coincidental. Behind the figure of the redeeming,
loving Father who sacrifices his own son for the redemption of humankind
looms the darker visage of a Father who demands such sacrifice, not for
redemption but for self-preservation: Saturn, who eats his children and
jealously guards his sovereignty. We must have no other gods before him.
The qualities inherent in the figure of Saturn, and thus in the saturnine
temperament, are just those that comprise the shadow of our culture, the
less-than-noble values most of us live by even though we often think we
shouldn’t. In other words, we worship a god we’re not sure we want to believe
in. Saturn informs most of our collective fantasies of psychology: unchanging
paradigms of mental health, scientific measurement, classification systems
(as in, for example, the diagnostic manuals of psychology, all manner of
psychological tests, nosologies), and especially the dogma that the “healthy”
personality is a unified, monolithic structure without identity crises. Saturn,
who invented money, is the archetypal miser, both hoarding and spending,
and giving us our notions of tithing, the Federal budget and its chronic
deficit, savings-and-loan associations, tight credit, and consumerism. The
influence of Saturn is found in all permanent structures, both material and
mental: skyscrapers that dominate the landscape; the “nuclear family”, which
must last as an eternal “value”; all neurotic and ideological constructs of
reality that are not amenable to change. To the extent that we worship “safety”
and “security,” to that extent we worship Saturn, and pay the price of his
service in escalating paranoid anxiety as the ability to provide safety and
security decreases in a world pockmarked with terrorist cells and moving too
fast. The values of Saturn have become our gods. And a god is always
something larger and more terrifying than the sum of his parts.
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In one sense, we are much closer to our medieval and Renaissance

forebears than we might think: they considered that since institutions were
ordained by God, they are inherently good; it is only the sins of men that
make them bad. Whether these institutions are governments, armies, schools,
or the Super Bowl, they all tend to follow the same pattern: the longer
institutions last, the more they take on the characteristics of Saturn, tending
to swallow up any movement that threatens their existence. One of the best
tragicomic examples of this came recently from the United States Congress,
which felt compelled to legislate a “Defense of Marriage Act,” as if that sacred
institution needed any defense from mere mortals. Defense against what?
We live in a culture ruled by Saturn, whose craggy masculine face is
most visible in our religious and political structures and traditions, whose
clenched miserly fist is most visible in our capitalist structures and fantasies
of financial self-reliance, and whose sterile pinched testicles are most visible
wherever there are oppressive attitudes toward sexuality and the constricted,
hemorrhoidal anality that too often passes for love. And like Saturn, we have
probably, as a culture, entered our dotage.
The signs that we are entering our dotage may be seen in our culture’s
misplaced priorities and its absurdly contradictory set of values. We are, for
example, a culture devoted to eternal youth, bent on stopping the progress
of history and the passage of time. No one wants to look or feel older than
thirty. Paradoxically, while we spend billions of dollars annually keeping our
bodies beautiful and young, we “fast-track” our children into a premature
adulthood, goading them into endless rounds of non-stop activity (for which
we then drug them), year-round schools, after-school jobs, and military
service, in which they are forced to fight old men’s wars. Like Saturn, we are
systematically swallowing our progeny—devouring their childhood. They
are being gobbled up by cults, catapulted into adulthood by pubescent
pregnancies, given easy access to guns. If they survive past the age of
seventeen, some of them get ingested into universities (where the arts are
no longer liberal or fine, but given over to the utilitarian ideal of
employability), while many more are swallowed up in Saturn’s favorite venue
for hosting his wayward offspring—prison. It isn’t any wonder that our
children, unable to swallow the version of reality we ply them with, develop
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their own modern version of acedie in the form of saturnine eating

disorders. Most tragic of all are those who have not lived long enough
either to have a history or to imagine a genuine adult future, who kill
themselves before they can realize that death is merely an escape, not a
solution.
There has to be a reason why a culture like ours, frenetic, manic, forward-
looking and in love with the ideals of progress and perfectibility—the legacy
of the Enlightenment—should be creating so many depressed people. I am
myself a statistic illustrating the status quo, since in most external ways I lead
an extraordinarily unexceptional mainstream life. As I write this, I am plugged
into the Internet via cable access; I have voice mail on my phone, a fax-copier-
scanner-printer at my elbow, a computer with 32 MB of RAM and a 6-
Gigabyte hard drive. Behind me is a window that looks out over a lovely little
patch of grassy hill that runs down to a large pond on the other side of a narrow
but thick strip of woods, in which live little animals who come often to visit
on my tiny back patio: chipmunks, rabbits, ducks, geese, squirrels, and an
astonishing variety of birds. I am only a fifteen-minute drive from the nearest
urban center, the capital of my state. There is a little money in the bank; my
health is good. I have been through the usual vicissitudes: love known and
lost; love betrayed; academic awards and frustrations; friends and enemies,
both solidly permanent and in flux; family reunions and conflicts that tear
the heart; worries about paying taxes, chronic illness, dying before I’m ready.
On the national scale of things-most-feared and in the cosmic scheme
of things, I should be carefree, optimistic, light-hearted, peaceful. But, like
millions of others whose external lives look almost exactly like mine, I wake
each morning under a cloud whose silver lining is at times terrifyingly thin,
and sometimes isn’t there at all. I have to guess and take it on faith that there
is in fact a sun behind the cloud, but I am not always able to believe this,
and not very convinced when I do. Something less than “clinical depression,”
something much more than a soft malaise. I recall a line from novelist James
Cabell: “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds;
and the pessimist fears this is true.”16 The old god Saturn reminds me daily
that things are not as they appear, that the beautiful sunlight filling the rooms
166
of my little house can reach only so far to the patch of darkness in the heart,
and that one does not come without the other.
While maintaining Saturn’s qualities in its collective life, our manic
culture is doing whatever it can to resist the downward gravitational pull of
Saturn, to overthrow the irascible, scowling god who worries about his throne
toppling. Unconscious resistance to Saturn is visible in psychologies that
worship emotionality, and that are in opposition to intellect; that elevate the
child’s naivety so that it appears as wisdom; that equates the magnitude of
the total person with the small ego; and whose only real concern is to feel
good today and better tomorrow.
In short, we live in a pessimistic culture showing manic symptoms,
trying desperately to be optimistic and “healthy-minded.” Ogden Nash said
it best:
The optimist fell ten stories

And at each window bar
He shouted to the folks below,
“All right so far!”
Wherever there is a generation gap, it is filled by Saturn, who cannot

generate (mythic history tells us he is impotent as well as a misogynist) and
who opposes generation (moving into the future) by swallowing anything
that threatens to emerge into newness of life—which, from his point of view,
would require his own death. The biblical Book of Ecclesiastes was surely
written by a man of true saturnine consciousness: Vanity of vanity, all is
vanity, says the Preacher, and there is nothing new (and there’d better not
be) under the sun (or Son).
Another way to frame the problem of the pessimistic, melancholic
saturnine vision versus the optimistic, sanguine cultural outlook is to see
the culture as an expression of the puer (literally, “eternal youth”) figure.
This is the figure portrayed in myth, literature, and film as an adolescent or
young adult who believes himself to be, and charmingly convinces us he is,
immortal. The puer is the spirit of upward flight, of quest, of endless
adventure and triumph, whose tragedies are always romantic and are the stuff
of legend and Hollywood blockbusters. The puer is the other side of the wise
and dirty old man, the senex, personified most clearly in myth as Saturn.
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But these two cannot be separated, or else the archetype is split and its
full meaning is lost. The puer is, more accurately, not the exact opposite
of the senex, but his companion.
Youth looks to age for structure, not correction; so the puer looks to
the senex for direction and definition, for order, meaning, focus, and the
solid ground of history, as well as mature weight to complement a young,
feather-light emotionality. As two sides of the same psychological structure,
they share many characteristics: a sense of decay and preoccupation with
low life, decadence, dirt, anality, lust. Old senex men and young puer men
are brothers in pornography. Neither has a mature sense of sexuality nor
real interest in actual, individual women. They also share an attitude of
resistance to change—the senex because he is ultraconservative by nature,
the puer because change means the horror of growing up. Peter Pan is a puer.
Sometimes this resistance takes the form of resistance to analysis or depth
therapy—not to mention serious love relationships—which place ethical
demands on the senex- or рuer-psyche, for both of them have great difficulty
with eros, the capacity for empathy and intimacy. Sometimes, too, the
slowness to change appears in habits of laziness or sloth, the old sin of acedie
as a bodily vice.
Puer and senex share a fascination with death, the former from the
frustration that comes with the absence of a spiritual life, the latter from
looking back at the end of life and finding not history, but only a series of
events. And yet, some of this fascination with death and dying is not
necessarily symptomatic of a return to the womb—womb as escape hatch
from life; or womb as rectifier, where all is warm and made right and one
can start again; or womb as tomb, the first, last, and best place to nap forever.
No doubt there is all of this, and more; but the fascination with death may
also be seen as an attempt at transforming a dead or deadened spirit. Why
do young men fall in love with their various flying machines? Why do
daredevils jump over sixty cars on a motorcycle or take bungee jumps from
high bridges? Why do old men wearing pounds of gold braid plot strategies
to kill young men from other countries? And why do young men agree to
carry out these old men’s strategies?
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et’s face it: those silly bumper stickers are true. Life is hard; then you
L die. Shit happens. And the old cliches and happy-go-lucky song lyrics
of the 1930s and ‘40s are deceptively half-true: life may be “just a bowl
of cherries,” but most of them have pits. If you “let a smile be your
umbrella,” that doesn’t guarantee you won’t get rain-soaked and probably
sick. Living on the “sunny side of the street” will not make you less likely
to get skin cancer.
“Don’t worry, be happy” may make a catchy jingle, but there’s plenty
to worry and be unhappy about when you consider there is nothing left
to eat that won’t kill us with carcinogens, preservatives, pesticides, E. coli,
fat, fat substitutes, sugar, sugar substitutes. Nothing is safe any more—not
even airbags. Nothing is secure any more, least of all Mother Nature, to
whom New Age folk look for semi-personal maternal care. But Mom
Nature has a way of quaking the earth, whipping up hurricanes, tornadoes,
typhoons, monsoons, volcanoes, ice storms, heat waves, drought and
floods that make short work of the optimist’s view that the earth is a safe,
friendly place. Beautiful, yes, even sustaining—but not particularly
friendly. Look at what happened to the dinosaurs.
William James had it right when he pointed out that those whom he
called “sick souls”, or “twice-born”, were those for whom easy answers were
no answers at all, and for whom the world was a place of pain and suffering
and loss, and that what such a person needed most was to make sense of it,
to find meaning in the down side. For such persons, “cure” was irrelevant,
even if possible. James himself was such a “sick soul,” suffering most of his
life from periodic bouts of debilitating melancholia. (Fortunately for us, his
attempts at suicide failed.) IfJames’s eloquence and testimony to the “appalling
convincingness” of the melancholia that comes “from a deeper region” do not
persuade, let me call, as my next witness to the value of the pessimistic view,
Archy the Cockroach.
Archy was friend to newspaper columnist Don Marquis of the New
York Sun during the 1920s and ‘30s. Because of his lowly insect form and
fear of being squashed, Archy dared not show himself in daylight in “the
boss’s” office, and typed in lower case because he lacked the strength to
depress the shift key on Marquis’s typewriter. He wrote his commentaries
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on human affairs nightly, after dining on crumbs dropped from the boss’s lunch
sandwich. His small size also gave him a roach’s-eye view of the underside of
human life. He warned his readers time and again not to laugh at his outward
appearance: Archy was in fact a philosopher of the first rank, who, but for an
accident of reincarnation, would have returned in human form and received
richly deserved acclaim for his genius. As it was, the accident condemned him
to heroic but lonely nightly efforts to make his philosophic voice heard—
such accident being further proof that the world is unpredictable, karma is
not reliable, fate sometimes makes terrible mistakes, and God occasionally
naps on the job. Archy, known as “the Vermin Voltaire,” wisely defined an
optimist as “a guy that has never had very much experience.”17
For optimists, it is probably true that when the going gets tough, the
tough get going. But for wise persons like Archy, when the going gets tough,
the smart thing to do is to say, “I knew this would happen. The hell with
it.” Not every problem needs a solution. Some of us are too weak to depress
the shift key so our lives are lived in lower case. So what? We don’t all have
to be successful capitalists.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
Memory and Nostalgia
... [M]emory can perform retrospective

maneuvers to compensate for fate. Loss is a
magical preservative. Time stops at the point
of severance, and no subsequent impressions
muddy the picture you have in mind. ...
Nostalgia—that most lyrical of feelings—
crystallizes around these images like amber.
... Nostalgia is a source of poetry, and a form
of fidelity.
—Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation1

emory, named Mnemosyne by the ancient Greeks, who knew her
M as a goddess, is the mother of the Muses, those mythic persons

that generate art, music, history, and poetry. And so Memory is
also the mother of the Muse, Dame Melancholy, and the matrix from which
all creative endeavors are born. Aristotle placed “memory” in the same part
of the soul as the “imagination.”2
In modern times, memory has become another example of Jung’s
saying that the “gods have become diseases.” Like melancholy, Memory also
has become a disease: no longer a goddess, preserving, securing and
solidifying our histories, but a mere function: disturbing our peace, too
intrusive, frustratingly elusive. There are programs to improve its capacity
for names and numbers and programs to remove “bad” memories. Once-
divine Memory has become a patient of modern American psychotherapy,
abused, disturbed, needing to be recovered and released from repression.
Mnemosyne, who was once greatly honored through her nine daughters,
the Muses, now is hauled daily into courtrooms as well as consulting
rooms, a defendant in the false-memory syndrome debate, accused of
being unreliable, distorted, manipulative, contrived, and basically, a liar
giving “false” testimony.
Our modern psychological mistake, of course, has been to literalize
Memory, reducing her from person to function, associating her with events,
data, factual truth. But Memory is not much interested in mere record
keeping, faultless accounts and accurate testimony. She is concerned with
imaginal life, the life and preservation of images—even if those recollections
have a slowing effect on us and pull us down into blue moods, gray lethargies,
dark moments of near-despair. In the course of psychic life, literal events by
themselves count for relatively little; look at the paucity of literal events in
the life of Emily Dickinson, or Marcel Proust, who spent years in bed
engaging in a remembrance of things past.
As a people, Americans have a pronounced antipathy to history. History,

after all, moves us back in time and down to a deeper perception of patterns
at work—two directions Americans have always associated with wasteful
regression. History is also a constant reminder of the fact of death, and that
all things end. Americans by tradition and collective temperament have always
been more interested in beginnings than in endings; what has already come
and gone does not interest a people whose face is always to the future. (What
American president has not promised in his campaign and his inauguration
speech that the country’s “best days” lie ahead?) So naturally the national
shadow grows darker and more depressive as it falls into ever-lengthening
history, that graveyard of mostly untended markers in which are buried some
of the deepest secrets of how we came to be the way we are. It is in this shadow
that many melancholics live, largely unconsciously preserving the sense of
history for the culture, struggling to make meaning of it.
Rather than regarding history as a solid ground for identity and a treasure
trove of cultural richness, as older nations might, America—even many of its
immigrants—imagines history as old baggage, trunks full of outmoded, useless
memories, which too often induce a disturbing melancholy. And yet we feel
the deprivation, and miss the pleasure earlier generations took in remembering
and telling the old tales of how it used to be. These are the well-loved and
sometimes frightening and sad stories that begin, “In my day ....”
Human beings need history (memories and images of the past, not just
facts), for without a deep sense of “past,” there is paralyzing existential anxiety,
and the future is a blank. The growing popularity in recent years of the
memoir as a literary genre—though some have criticized it as a genre too
personalistic to be considered serious literature—suggests that there may well
be an attempt under way to recover that sense of history in literary form. It
is not new, but its resurgence is heartening. It is a move toward recovering
Memory as Muse, a counteraction to cultural amnesia. The Blue Lady of
Diirer’s engraving could just as well be holding a pen in her hand, instead
of a compass, beginning to write her remembrances, wondering where,
amidst such wealth, to start.
Imagine Memory, then, as a compacted collection of images, so solid
that it becomes the body or substance or content of your melancholy. Or
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MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA
imagine Memory as the container for these contents, as a cool dark vault
housing a museum of memories, unfulfilled dreams as well as triumphs and
small satisfactions; and there is a large room, where you can view the exhibits
on display, called, “What Might Have Been.”
In a more melancholic key, imagine Memory as a prison from which
there is no escape and the term is life, a place where your life is lived again
and again and there is no apparent progress. This is the prison of those
memories we can’t forget even though we desperately want to, memories
that originate in our deepest wounds, which often are the genesis of both
the deepest pathology and genuine creativity. These memories come back
time and again, feeling almost like divine retribution for unknown or long-
past sins and crimes, even those from childhood, when we may have been
truly innocent.
Mnemosyne not only takes us back into historical time but even before
that, to “mythic time”—that is, she takes us out of time altogether, to “time
out of mind.” In a reverie of memory-images, we need not stop at childhood,
but recede even further, to some unknown and astonishing plane, where one's
individual life touches all those that have gone before. Far from being
imprecise, this sense of connectedness seems almost always related to a specific
sensate experience from one’s own life: the color of light on a summer
afternoon, the odor of an old garage, the sight of an antique in a particular
store corner at a particular moment, the spontaneous touch of a lover’s hand with
just that particularly characteristic stroking gesture. Any of these may bring back
a faded memory, blurred, obscure, wispy and cloud-like, but powerfully sensate,
containing substance; and with the returned memory comes a much deeper sense
that there was something even before that, or beyond, something more, just out
of reach .... One can feel in a single moment the passing ofeons. Gaston Bachelard
wrote, “In our reverie which imagines while remembering, our past takes on
substance again. Over and above the picturesque, the bonds between the world
and the human soul are strong. Then there lies within us not a memory of history
but a memory of the cosmos. Times when nothing happened come back.”3
Because memory is a place of equal delight and torment, it gives melancholy
its characteristic bittersweet flavor. John Keats, poet, foil of passion and dead at
26, wrote these lines in his “Ode on Melancholy:”
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But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
Perhaps as Dame Melancholy sits within the frame of Diirer’s

engraving, she is remembering, lost in reverie. Keats certainly knew and
understood her, and in his own poetic melancholy shows the truth of
Bachelard’s recognition, that the “smiling regret” the poet experiences helps
us “realize the strange synthesis of regret and consolation. A beautiful poem
makes us pardon a very ancient grief.”4
Ungovernable Memory
In the theory of the four humors, melancholy was thought to produce

the best memory, since black bile, its predominant humor, was “cold” and
“dry.” This made the condition of melancholy excellent for storage, like a
refrigerator, and the melancholic was thought to receive memory impressions
or images more firmly, and retain them longer, than people of other
temperaments. This does not mean that the content of memory was
experienced as “good” and “pleasurable,” but that the faculty of memory, the
ability to remember, worked better in melancholics than in people of other
humoral dispositions. In fact, the stronger the memory-image, the greater the
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emotion and therefore the retention. “Remarkably beautiful or hideous,

dressed in crowns and purple garments, deformed or disfigured with blood
or mud, smeared with red paint, comic or ridiculous, they [memory-images]
‘move strongly’ and so adhere to the soul.5
While the melancholic person was thought to have an excellent faculty
of memory, he or she was also thought to be unable to govern it. Common
knowledge declared that melancholics were uncontrolled in everything,
greedy, driven by lust. Plato, for example, puts melancholics, lovers, and
drunkards together. Shakespeare observed that “lunatics, lovers and poets
are of imagination all compact.”6 Melancholics have no command over their
memory. They cannot remember what they want when they want; their
memories bring things back intrusively, “unseasonably.” Also, they tend to
stutter or mix their words, since speech is slower than thought; sometimes
they speak awkwardly with poor syntax, owing to the rapidity of their
thoughts. Thus, memory—as an uncontrollable, ungovernable faculty,
capable of holding practically everything but yielding nothing in its wanted
season—was both a great gift of melancholia and also part of its affliction.
Having such a melancholic memory is like having an overstocked warehouse
of images with no way of taking inventory.
This capricious quality of memory worked two ways: it made the
melancholic person excessively irritable, and it became characteristic of
genius. The capacity to reproduce images of compelling force and with
vivid emotional immediacy—what an artists does in a powerful painting
or compelling novel—has no doubt contributed to the traditional
association of art and madness, the artist as tormented melancholic, or
the melancholic tormented by artistic genius. This “agitated and
overcrowded memory,” as it was called, once awakened, could not be
stopped, and took on the character of an obsession. The vehemence of
the melancholic’s imagination led to the association of “melancholia” with
“passion.” (In Arabic, for example, both the words black and melancholic
are synonymous with passion.)
In the Early Middle Ages, the alchemist/priest Albertus Magnus
differentiated two types of melancholy. The first was the cold and dry type of
the black bile humor. The second kind, said Albertus, is hot and dry, a choleric
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melancholy. This is not “ordinary” melancholy, but intellectual, inspired

melancholy. “Inspired melancholy” makes you mentally hot, heats the brain,
and brings the mind to fever pitch. It is not an obliterating emotional heat,
which only creates confusion in thinking; rather, it is an intellectual fervor, a
passion of the mind in ferment. And this is a good place to remember that
the word passion comes from a Latin root meaning “to suffer.” The idea that
will not let you go, the poem that must be written, the theme running relentlessly
through a musician’s head, the political activist’s urgent world-changing
plan, the psychologist’s radical new theory—all these may be the
compelling, gripping, igniting intellectual force that fuels itself on the black
bile of melancholy.
But the bile is, indeed, black, so that the greatness or creativity it
generates is often felt as cruelly inflicted rather than benignly bestowed.
Children who endure long years of neglect and even abuse may know early
in their lives that there is an artistry in them, but such a fate is not always
welcome in harsh circumstances, and requires a difficult coming to terms
with Fate before the gift is truly a gift and not only a curse. Actress Sarah
Bernhardt, painter Salvador Dali, soldier T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), painter
Vincent van Gogh, philosopher Simone Weil, dancer Vaslav Nijinski—all
suffered as melancholic children.
Cursed or blessed with a superlative faculty of memory, the melancholic
person often feels adrift in an ocean of memory-images, constantly being
pulled backward and downward by the undertow of the imagination, fearful
of drowning, overwhelmed by depth. And the horizon is so far, far away.
The “pure memory,” says Bachelard, has no date. It has a season. “The
season is the fundamental mark of memories. What sun or what wind was
there that memorable day? That is the question which gives the right tension
of reminiscence. Then the memories become great images, magnified,
magnifying images.”7
Nostalgia
Nostalgia is connected to the idea of “religious melancholy.” Following

James’s notion of pessimism as a viable religious world view, nostalgia may
be considered as the “romantic” aspect of pessimism. The bleakness of old
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Saturn, banished with his scraggly gray beard and arthritic limp to the
distant past, is present again, now joined in nostalgia with the deep longing
of the Blue Lady, Melancholy. It is through the experience of nostalgia that
we feel, and not just philosophize about, the real pain of death’s finality,
loss, and the realization that what is lost is gone absolutely forever.
Look again at Durer’s image of Dame Melancholy. She resides in the
mature person who has something to be melancholic about: loss, many
memories, faded dreams and glories, nostalgic history. She is not much
concerned with youthful follies that pass in an instant or that can be
smoothed over by an equally fleeting moment of pleasure. She is a heavy,
solid, majestic woman; she wears a gown of thick, enduring fabric—an
“April shroud”—not the cotton summer frock of a wispy Persephone
amongst the flowers.
Her gaze, in Diirer’s engraving, is directed at nothing in particular.
Unlike youth, which looks at the immediate present, Melancholy looks back,
or ahead, and always inward—but almost never at anything in particular.
She is not goal-oriented, we would say in behavioral terms. Melancholy is a
mood which colors all experiences and events, but focuses on no one of them
specifically. All things entering my blue melancholic mood become
melancholic too, take on a blue or violet or gray cast. The song I hear on
the radio; a friend’s voice on the telephone; a sudden, fleeting memory from
childhood; a distinctive smell I can’t quite place; last night’s dream feeling;
thoughts for a new work project—any of these contribute to the mood by
becoming part of it. Melancholy is a shroud, a veil, or a pall; it is a reminder
of the heaviness of mortality, and in some darkly profound way, it prepares
one for death.
Perhaps this is why melancholy feels so close to nostalgia, a longing
for something relatively unknown, or for a time long past, or a time that
never was, nor will be—yet the loss of it is so great that its absence lies
like a stone in the heart.
What is longed for is hidden in the root meaning of the Greek word
“nostalgia” (from nostos, meaning “a return home,” and -algial -algo, meaning
“painful”). Nostalgia means, literally, a painful return home, or the pain of
returning home. Whatever home we long to return to is a source of pain
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precisely because we cannot return to it. “Home” may be that actual

childhood home of family, or the Eden of innocence, or heaven, or that
time and place where one first discovered love. If the effort to return is
expended in work—serious, meaningful work, the pain may be endured
even if the return cannot be accomplished. And work means just that:
labor, whether of love or duty, whatever commands our best effort in a
worthwhile endeavor. Not Prozac, not more socializing to get your mind
off things, not distractions to make you feel good, but serious work. The
ancient Greeks had a saying that the Muses, daughters of Memory, can change
the weave of Fate, suggesting that through creative work we find redemptive
meaning, and can change the design, if not the fabric, of our lives.
The term “melancholy” includes but does not adequately convey this
quietly passionate nostalgic longing. The object of such longing does not
have a single name; it cannot truly be spoken. To historians it is the “Golden
Age.” To mystics it is the lost vision of God. To poets it is the object of
unrequited love. To psychoanalysts it is the prenatal womb. To Jungians it
is the Great Mother, the timeless mythic, archetypal idea of beginning and
end. It is perhaps all of these, or none; what characterizes the longing is that
the longed-for thing or place belongs in another dimension entirely—not
in time at all (past, future), but in timelessness.
Melancholic nostalgia is an eternal longing for that which is eternal.8
Melancholics mourn both mortality and entrapment in time. We find in
melancholy a mood that warps us into timelessness, and a reverie like a
nostalgia for death. Melancholics are by nature and temperament especially
vulnerable to painful nostalgia. It is very often difficult, if not impossible,
to find meaning in this pain; so it is no surprise when a melancholic state
of mind brings thoughts of suicide—not so much as a result of depression
over failure to be perfect or some other egocentric concern (although this
too may drive one to suicidal despair), but because meaning has failed:
the ability to find meaning in life has failed. Or, to put it perhaps more
accurately, meaning has failed to make itself known and felt. God has
remained silent, and the deafening sound of this silence is more than most
mortals can bear. At bottom, there is a close, even fatal link between
melancholic nostalgia and the medieval affliction of acedie, that terrible
180
condition of spiritual despair so complete that one no longer cares about

the fact that one no longer cares.
SCENE: Long Island—1955-76

A Tale ofDame Melancholy’s Cousin: Portrait ofMy Mother
n 1955 my mother was forty-two years old, looked thirty-five, told everyone
I she was twenty-nine. She had a terrible fear of aging, or of appearing old.
While she watched her diet, exercised a bit, kept the gray out of her auburn
hair and had more energy than anyone I knew, there was still a desperation
about the gaiety and zest for life which kept her running. She ran into life,
but she also ran from the fateful biological clock which, as she knew but would
never admit, ticked only for so many minutes in a single life and then stopped.
My mother was lively, a natural dancer, very concerned with her physical
appearance. Exceptionally attractive, brunette hair, dark eyes, she inherited
the best features from both sides of her family. Even in middle age, when she
began to thicken around the middle, she always gave the impression of being
light and petite (she stood just five feet without shoes) and met all the high
collective standards of the time for the most feminine of women. She was
warm, gracious, and outgoing, and everyone loved her. Most engaging was
her buoyant sexuality, which took delight in flirting with handsome men,
teasing my unresponsive and probably embarrassed saturnine father, wearing
clothes that showed off her figure and, when the social event called for it, as
revealing of her physical charms as possible without being ostentatious or in
bad taste. In short, she had a distinct style, carried herself gracefully, stood
out in a crowd, smiled always, laughed easily, and appeared to have not a care
in the world. Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on her.
And yet one often sensed a tension just below the surface. My mother’s
somewhat histrionic flair for the dramatic, though endearing and sometimes
maddening and embarrassing to the more conservative members of the family,
masked a deeper, darker side, which harbored a certain melancholy. She was
not empty or flighty or insubstantial; it was rather that she did not, would
or could not, allow her real depth and substance, her genuine artistic talent
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and creative intelligence, to be as defining as her physicality and extroverted

congeniality. She put away much of herself in order that another self could
bask in admiration. On rare occasions my mother would suddenly fall into a
mood of prickly irritability. On still rarer occasions she would explode with
rage, slam doors, yell and cry. I never knew what set off these shocking
fits of temper, but there seemed to be a correlation with my father’s
criticisms: “You’re stubborn. You’re not practical—you dream. You’re
stubborn. I wish you’d stop wiggling around in public places when you
hear music. You’re stubborn.”
After my mother passed her fortieth birthday—that is, when she
turned twenty-nine for the eleventh year in a row—her penchant for
nostalgia became more evident. Increasingly she looked to the past as the
time of pleasure. She never tired of telling stories about the distant past:
about the wonderful things her father had done; about childhood
adventures with her favorite older brother; about how much less expensive
things were back then; about how she had managed with rations and
shortages during the war, when I was an infant and my father was in the
Army fighting in Europe; about how she loved Glen Miller’s music, and
Tony Martin’s voice, and Robert Taylor’s acting; about how she had made
salmon croquettes every night for my father in the early years of their
marriage because they had no money, and now my father would not eat
salmon under any circumstances.
My mother would always laugh during these recitals, and, like all good
storytellers, would draw us into the tale so we laughed too. But she never
told of unhappy endings, tragedy, or failure. She never mentioned her older
sister, who had committed suicide. She never spoke of her own mother in
any personal way, betraying a difficulty in the relationship, which remained
unresolved all her life. She loved to hear and grew nostalgic at the
remembrance of the song, “I’ll Walk Alone,” made popular during the War,
but she never spoke of the fear and loneliness in which she lived for years,
waiting for my father to come home. She often told the story of how she
received the Western Union telegram informing her that her husband was
“missing in action” (though he was later found wounded), making light of
the shock, swelling the drama but not her worry. She gave up her career in
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graphic art, which she loved and for which she had a natural talent, but she
spoke of it only once, with regret. She never spoke of the hardship of coming
into adulthood during the Great Depression, or the fact that she had had to
put off getting married for more than seven years because there was not enough
money to live independently.
These former times were, for my mother, nostalgic and cast in an
afterglow of romance, the hardship subsumed under the adventure, the
personal pain buried under the greater drama of economic disaster and
world war. In her nostalgia the shadows of grief and regret appeared only
when they cast themselves over her sunlit optimism, revealing themselves
subtly in a lowering of her voice, a clouding of her otherwise bright eye,
an occasional drifting of her attention away from her listener. And
sometimes, when an old song came on the radio, that soft, nostalgic
melancholy filled her whole body with the music she loved from that earlier
time, and, unable to draw my unromantic father into it, she would dance
in the living room alone.
We all knew my mother was born to be a star. She belonged in the
center of the stage. But she was just as much a child of the melancholic moon
as of the bright spotlight. Her sun never set, but the clock ran out—too soon.
Much too soon.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
Shame and Guilt

SCENE: Dr. Burtons house, just before dawn
have been thinking, Dr. Burton, that much of the burden I carry
"I is the shame of my condition.” Dame Melancholy slumped low
in her chair, her wings curling awkwardly where they scraped the
floor. “Look at me: I am old and tire easily, my dress is drab, my hair dull
gray. Surely people would be more welcoming if I wore a gown of gold
thread, if my hair shone silver, if a smile came more easily to my face.”
Dr. Burton was taken aback by this sudden confession. He was ashamed
to find it struck a chord in him, for he, too, had secretly thought his visitor
rather unattractive. All these years he had struggled to recognize her inward
beauty, but now he was forced to admit her appearance was—he involuntarily
lowered his eyes—usually distasteful. But he could not tell her this; it would
wound her to the core. And so now her shame became his.
He could see that some of the intensity of her eyes had softened. It was
hard to tell in the weak candlelight, but he thought he saw the beginnings of
a tear. Dame Melancholy, one elbow propped on the armrest of her chair,
raised a tired hand to cover her eyes as she spoke. Her hair did not look so
wild now.
Her voice had fallen so low he had to strain to hear her. “Poets praise me
and even think me beautiful. It is their wish to make me lovelier than I am so
that they will love me. But I know I am not loved—I am merely tolerated.
They try to love me, these poets and thinkers and wise ones. I know that,
and, truth to tell, I love them for it. But the fact is, Dr. Burton, we all know
I am unlovely and unlovable, and I am always in need. Soon, when the sun
comes up, I shall be exposed in my penury, my shabbiness.”
Dr. Burton shook his head in denial, a failed attempt to comfort her.
But it was a lie, and he knew it, feeling guilty that he was less than honest
with his guest, and ashamed that he, too, believed that all she said of herself
was true. Though he knew the value of her gifts, still he did not want it
known to anyone that she came to him bringing her need, her poverty,
her wracking self-examinations, and her chronically disheveled appearance,
which, unmitigated by her size or formidable wings, only emphasized
the self-contempt that was part of her contradictory nature. He knew this,
but a quiet, shame-tinted reticence stopped him from saying anything.
“I confess to you, Dr. Burton, there is something lacking in me. I
feel it deeply. I am so large—you can imagine my wing span, if I could
ever open them fully—but within myself I feel so small. I seem unable to
be anything worthy. Isn’t it odd, doctor, that philosophers and artists
associate me with greatness, I who am so much less than I appear? It is
my secret shame, and I tell you this only because it eases my soul to speak
of this burden, and because I know you to be a private man of modesty,
one who respects secrets.” Her voice broke, but with her face shadowed,
Dr. Burton could not tell if she was laughing softly in her usual self-
deprecating way, or if she could no longer hold back her tears.
“Dear Lady, you give me more than my due. If I do not reveal secrets,
it is because I have too many of my own.” He suddenly realized something
he had known for a long time. “We are both poor in spirit, my friend,
and we are both guilty of wrongs done and ashamed of how little we are:
you, because you are capable of so much but find yourself trapped amongst
mortals, and I, because in my mortal weakness I long to have wings like
yours on which I could rise to heaven and look upon the face of God.”
Startled by their sudden, unexpected intimacy, Dr. Burton cleared
his throat and said, “But—first I shall make some more tea.”
Author’s Elaboration
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues

And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me ....
—Shakespeare, Richard III1
Were it not for the inherent sense of shame that accompanies it,
melancholy might be valued more highly as a psychological experience. But
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SHAME AND GUILT
like melancholy, Shame and her first cousin Guilt have a minus sign
attached to them, like a stigma, degrading them. They have no utilitarian
value in a culture ruled by the gods of efficiency and optimism. They are
excess baggage in a streamlined, fast-moving, modern, progressive life,
mere negatives to be eliminated. But just as we have been trying to restore
dignity and importance to the experience of melancholy, now we must
try to find these in the experiences of shame and guilt.
From earliest times, philosophers and poets have counted shame and
guilt as basic ingredients of melancholy, recognizing them in the downcast
eyes, the heavy head that shows the soul afflicted with red shame and black
guilt. Their weight pulls down, casts a pall, keeps the head bowed. Shame
crushes with the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and insufficiency; guilt
racks with the intolerable burden of irreparable wrongs done.
Shame has to do with absence, or the lack of something, a
fundamental human insufficiency. It has to do with a sense of loss, which
is perhaps why it is as strong and indelible as grief, and why it is so often
an ingredient of melancholy. Shame and guilt do not bring the bittersweet
melancholy of ruinous love, nor the sad nostalgia of a lost Golden Age.
But “conscience,” wrote Shakespeare, “doth make cowards of us all.”2 When
conscience is in such torment, Dame Melancholy wraps her wings around
us and covers us in darkness; but her embrace is a tomb, and her darkness
evokes the fear of death.
The Goddess Aidos
Shame comes at least partly in the realization that one is virtually

helpless against the affliction of melancholy. As William James pointed us
downward to the root of pessimism as a fundamentally religious view of the
world, so the deep experience of shame points to the fundamentally religious
nature of melancholy: the soul’s suffering of sorrow, grief, inadequacy, lack
of divine eros and desire—and its inability to address this concern adequately.
Shame is not about making things “better” or “right,” but about the
experience of our inability to do either.
The rings of Saturn are the soul’s prison, but it is precisely the
experience of shame in this wretched captivity that forces one to look inward,
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to find Saturn’s gift in the form of the creative Muse, the Lady Melancholy.
As Milton hailed her as “divinest Melancholy,” a goddess, so the ancient Greeks
knew her as Aides, a goddess whose name we translate inadequately into
English as “Shame.” But her name has many more meanings than our English
word can convey in its one pathetic syllable. She is the personification of shame
in all its shades and nuances and depths, and she endows us with a sense of
modesty, reticence, and respect for things that should remain hidden and
private. It is She who knows when to turn our eyes away from hidden
intimacies, private religious devotions, the solitude of grief.
Aidos personifies the shame that has to do with respect, awe, reverence,
and modesty. It is the kind of shame that inhibits one from looking at that
which is not to be seen, that brings a sense of mystery that is not to be profaned,
and that punctures all inflation by putting one in one’s proper place: within
bounds marked by God, or Fate, or the laws of nature. This is the shame one
feels in the presence of a divinity, in the receiving of a gift, in making love, in
a temple. It belongs to the essence of “religious melancholy,” since it both
elevates and shrouds what matters most to the heart.
According to an ancient Greek story, when the lovely Aphrodite was
born and rose from the sea-foam, she was immediately attended by the god
Eros, the three Horai (the Hours, literally, the “correct moment,” personifying
the sense of propriety), and the winged goddess Aidos. Aidos assists in clothing
Aphrodite as she emerges—as if naked Love is shameless, and must be draped
in modesty and reverence. It is not fitting that Love should be seen completely
exposed in her first appearance.
Aidos serves humanity in another essential capacity: she protects us from
ourselves. Centuries before Christ, the Greek poet Hesiod prophesied that
the “fifth race of men,” the race of “iron”—our own race—would perish
undefended when the Goddesses Aidos and Nemesis, dressed in white raiment,
returned home to the gods. For when Shame and Righteous Anger leave, there
is no defense against destruction. As the last hope against the worst in ourselves,
shame is the primary protection of our naked humanity. Without the protective
and constraining wings ofAidos, we would wreak far more havoc on our planet
than we already do. Every shameless act is a failure to honor Aidos, and in
response, she departs, leaving us exposed and dishonored.
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SHAME AND GUILT
To appreciate just how low is the regard in which we collectively

hold Aidos, one need only look at the shameless destructive policies and
actions that affect the world: exploitation of the poor to benefit the rich,
destruction of all forms of wildlife and their habitats, irresponsible
dumping of toxic wastes, excessive consumption and consummate
corporate and individual greed. This kind of behavior produces in most
of us natural responses of Righteous Anger and Shame.
But there are other, more subtle ways in which we fail to realize that
Aidos has left us—and left us hardened: not righteously angry but merely self-
righteous. When President Bill Clintons Grand Jury deposition (concerning
the Monica Lewinsky case) was broadcast through the Internet (August 1998),
the world was astounded at the shamelessness with which the Republican
Congressional leaders engineered the public humiliation of their President—
and without even informing him of their intentions until the tape had been
released. Aidos was not invited to attend the impeachment hearings.
Mark Twain’s observation was never more to the point: “Man is the
only animal that blushes—or needs to.”3
In modern psychology, shame has been accorded the dubious dignity
of being one of the bases of personality (the “shame-based personality”)—
but this is not the kind of personality anyone wants. Children suffer shame,
deeply and often. When they become adults, the idea seems to be to keep
the “inner child” alive but quash the shame. Most of us are ashamed of feeling
shame. We are told it is bad, or at least, unproductive. It is bad for health,
bad for “self-esteem”, hurts academic performance, ruins our social life, kills
sexual pleasure, and keeps us from advancement in our career. (Sometimes all
these at once!) Shame is something we think would be good for criminals.
And there are even those who think shame should be re-attached as a stigma
to unwed mothers to help reduce unwanted teenage pregnancies, to men who
visit prostitutes, and to parents whose children commit crimes. In short, shame
is not considered a good personality base for launching a confident, self-
sufficient, assertive, computer-literate, relaxed, sexually vital woman or man
striding forward through the twenty-first century.
Psychology has told us that shame is likely to make you feel like a victim
and that whatever you feel guilty about is probably not your fault. But in a
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remarkable and distinctly American twist, millions of us have managed

consciously to get rid of shame and guilt and still feel like victims. Of course,
shame and guilt and responsibility for one’s actions have always gone together,
but to the extent that we see no inherent value or benefit in experiencing
shame, to that extent we are unwilling to be responsible and accountable—
that is, to grow up.
The attempt to eliminate shame from our emotional repertoire is not
merely unrealistic and misguided; it works to dull our ability to recognize
psychopathy. The chief and most alarming characteristic of the psychopath
is the inability to feel shame. This is why the psychopath makes most of us
uneasy for reasons we may never consciously know, and why the traditional
figure of the psychopath is imagined as a not-quite-human monster. But
psychopathy is a human condition, in which a person is deficient in empathy
and in the capacity to feel shame. It is not “bestial” or sub-human, and this
is part of its horror, that it is so shockingly human. Psychopathy is not
necessarily an exceptionally large dollop of evil or monstrous cruelty that
marks the psychopath as different from everyone else; it is rather the absence
of the capacity to feel shame. It seems entirely possible, as some psychological
theorists have thought, that psychopaths are born as well as made. Born with
their “eros on crutches,” as Guggenbuhl-Craig phrased it,4 they are persons
who come into the world with a lacuna in the psyche, a hole, a place where
shame ought to be but isn’t. They are missing an element crucial to human
life and relationship, the capacity to identify with another’s feeling. And
some do become serial killers, rapists, mercenaries who kill for money as
well as pleasure.
But other psychopaths—in fact most of them—compensate for their
lack by learning how to live in the world as if they lacked nothing. Thus,
they tend to enter those professions that provide them with rules and
guidelines and ethical codes that tell them how to live, since they do not
have their own internal standard of conduct to guide them in human
relationships. Psychopaths know what is right and what is wrong; they do
not understand—cannot sense or feel—why it is right or wrong. The ministry
and psychology are particularly attractive careers, since these professions have
the strictest ethical codes of conduct and also carry some public status or
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approbation—-these professionals, presumably dedicating their lives to

helping others in an empathic way, are thought least likely to be immoral.
But becoming a minister or psychologist does not fill the absence of the
capacity for shame, it merely provides an outer structure that masks or
compensates for the inner deficiency. A psychopathic psychologist, for
example, knows it is wrong to have sex with a client, but does not
understand why this is wrong or hurtful, cannot empathically feel the
vulnerability or sense of betrayal in the client.
The human species, however, is not divided into those who are
psychopaths and those who are not. We are each deficient in some
psychologically important respect, each inadequate to some critically
important demand. And we are each capable of knowing that moment,
however fleeting, when we feel absolutely nothing in the face of moral horror.
Since we are by definition incomplete, every one of us is, in some secret recess
of the heart, a psychopath—in that place where empathy fails, where there
is no shame.
Melancholy is an antidote to our psychopathic inclinations, because
melancholy hurts. Wherever we have a psychopathic void, melancholy may
help fill it with the shame that we have such voids at all. “Divine Melancholy”
keeps us vulnerable to suffering and to beauty, keeps us attuned to grief, and
to our terrible inadequacies and insufficiencies, and this in turn keeps Aides,
with her great protective wings, very close to us.
ecall the lovely image of the goddess of Love, Aphrodite, coming forth
R from the sea, attended by Shame (Aides'), Desire (Eros) and Propriety
(the Horai). Psychologically, then, shame is primal, emerging from the sea
with love and desire. Shame at the seashore has an affinity with the salt in
the sea, a substance that carries both the wisdom and reticent modesty of
shame as well as its burning, corrosive, bitterness. And it has an affinity with
the sensual body and sexual love that is Aphrodite, so that the naked body
without eras and love without shame are both equally a disgrace.
The biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is almost
always told in terms of guilt and disobedience, but the story can be read
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just as deeply as a mythic account of the origin of shame, and how central
and primal shame is to the human condition.
It is written in Genesis 3:2-11 of Adam and Eve:
And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not
ashamed. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild
creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman,
“Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’ And
the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the
trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit
of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you
touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You
will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes
will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and
evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food,
and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be
desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she
also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both
were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they
sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden
in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves
from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the
garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him,
“Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in
the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid
myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked?” Have
you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
And the story continues, as we know, with the familiar tale of finger
pointing: man at woman, woman at serpent; and so it has been for eons, as
if shifting the blame might somehow ease the shame.
In Genesis, in and from the beginning, consciousness and shame are
synonymous. Heightened self-consciousness is an aspect of religious
melancholy, and it comes attended by shame. Recognition of one’s shame
(“their eyes were opened”), occasioned by one’s nakedness, is the first moment
of conscious self-awareness—and it is almost too much to bear. “They knew
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that they were naked." “Because I was naked I hid myself.” To know is to
feel shame. Along with the objective knowledge of good and evil comes
the experiential consciousness of shame. And the first impulse is to hide.
Their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked. This
sudden revelatory consciousness not only opens one’s eyes, it changes the
perception of what is seen: not just body, but naked body; not just reality,
but naked truth; not just human nature, but mortal essence. Primal shame
makes you not only psychologically conscious, it makes you physiological,
puts you into your body. Shame gives you body, and substance.
Actor John Hurt gave a moving performance in a poignant film titled,
“Love and Death on Long Island,” the story of a successful British writer
who has become a near-recluse in the years following his beloved wife’s death.
His grief has settled into chronic melancholy; writing is his refuge. One rainy
afternoon, having to wait to retrieve his lost apartment keys, he goes into a
movie theater, more to stay dry than from interest in the picture. But, to his
shock, he is captivated by the lead actor in the film, a handsome American
at least twenty years his junior.
Though nothing changes in his usual reserved demeanor, nor in his
daily routine, something has suddenly awakened inside the writer, and,
quietly, desire grows. It is not merely a sexual desire, but the longing for
connection, for intimacy, for happiness lost, for the chance to be needed
again. He starts a scrapbook, clipping and lovingly pasting every photograph
he can find of the famous young actor. At some point, arrived at with such
subtlety that he does not know how, he plans to go to Long Island where
the actor lives, find him, and befriend him. It becomes a compelling necessity.
And they do meet in Long Island and become friends, through the agency
of the young actor’s lover, an intelligent woman who wants the best for both
of them.
Finally, as the two men sit at lunch in a coffee shop, the older British
writer confesses his love for the young American actor—thinking, as he feels
he has been led to believe, that the young man feels exactly the same way in
return. He begins with the oldest preparatory phrase, “I have a confession
to make to you,” and begins to pour out his desperate heart. But the young
man, while he appreciates the writer’s friendship, loves the young woman.
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He is at first stunned, then embarrassed, then compassionate, then

tender—wordlessly, we see this in his eyes in a long sequence—and finally
he leaves without speaking but with a final gesture of comfort, his hand
on the writer’s slumped shoulder. The writer’s world begins to crumble
silently around and within him. Shame rises in him like the morning sun,
hot and red and illuminating his sad, vulnerable heart. One cannot watch
without feeling his shame as one’s own. He stares at nothing, in shock,
and softly asks the impossible Question: “Dear God—what have I done?”
As he sits there alone with his aching love exposed for all the world to
see, we wish for him the quiet mercy of a second chance.
The writer returns to England. We are left with a bittersweet sense that
his odyssey, though apparently unsuccessful, has changed him. That crucial
moment of shameful realization through rejection of his devotion has
changed him. In some strange melancholic way, disillusionment and shame
and helpless passion have brought him into life again.
Shame may be described as intolerable visibility. You are mercilessly
observed, like the British writer sitting in the coffee shop: it is not only the
young man who sees his love and need exposed; everyone in the shop, on the
street, in the city—the world—is watching intently, staring. Shame strikes
suddenly in a disruption, a moment of acute self-consciousness—like being
caught in the act of peeping through a keyhole. You become conscious not
simply of being there, but you seeyourselfbeing there, and this is the moment
of shame. Shame is intensified to a nearly intolerable degree by the presence
of an Other. The overwhelming impulse is to hide oneself, as Adam did in the
garden, as any of us do when we cover our eyes, wear paper bags over our head,
hang our head, wish to God the ground would open up and take us down out
of sight. It is a moment of stark nakedness—no covering, no protection.
But the fact that shame is usually imagined and experienced through
the presence of an Other does not mean it can’t overtake us when we are
alone, and be just as painful. Consciousness, after all, means “knowing with"
all your inward parts and being seen by them: some of the most excruciating
moments of shame come in dreams, or as abrupt, shocking intrusions of
memory in the solitary reminiscences of a drowsy summer afternoon. The
God who came looking for Adam stalks us too, from the inside.
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Possibly no one has expressed this intolerable visibility as profoundly

and powerfully as Nietzsche. Whereas Adam hid himself from God, Nietzsche
had to kill God, whose eyes saw everywhere and saw too deeply into the soul
to be borne. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the chapter entitled “The Ugliest
Man,” the Ugliest Man says this about God:
But he—had to die: he looked with eyes that beheld everything,

—he beheld men’s depths and dregs, all his concealed disgrace
and ugliness.
His pity knew no modesty: he crept into my dirtiest corners.

This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitying one had to die.
He ever beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge—

or not live myself.
The God who beheld everything, and also man: that God had
to die! Man cannot endure it that such a witness should live.5
Because stark visibility is so painful, it is difficult to see through it

to the way in which shame and creativity are connected. But like the
melancholy mood that may become a creative matrix, shame contributes
to the human capacity for creation, and is part of it. The serpent told Adam
and Eve they would become “like God”—and they did. But they become
god-like not only in having knowledge of good and evil, but in their
capacity to create, to generate. Their instinctive shameful response of
covering their genitals suggests that generation, or creativity, and shame
are inextricably linked.
There is no creativity without the body, and every creative work must
have body or be embodied. In Genesis, the naked body is the primal image
of shame—and this suggests that the naked body of every artist’s creation is
a source of shame as much as it is of pride, because it reveals and exposes
something ofthe essence ofthe creator. A poem, a song, a dance, a painting, a
book, a child—each of these generations becomes a source of shame because
the creator is exposed and at least partially known in them. Consciousness
is not just knowing oneself; it is being known by an other, and one is known
(generated, brought into being) through one’s creations.
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The capacity to create makes us fall into shame not so much because
we are like the animals, but because we are like God. Shame, the goddess
Aides, is that modifier or sense of modesty that puts us in proper perspective,
or puts us in our place: a likeness to other creatures, a likeness to the creator,
and an identification with neither. The human plane has always been
imagined as being somewhere between heaven and hell. Gerald Stern’s The
Angel Poem says it best:
My broken wing is on the left near the large joint

that separates me so crazily from half the others.
I think of trees and how they break apart
in the wind, how sometimes a huge branch
will hang in strips, what would be skin
in humans or angels, and how the flesh
is like pulp, and almost blood-red where the break is.
I tend to drag the wing because the pain

in lifting it is too much for me to stand.
That part of me that is still human recalls
what pain in the shoulder can be and I remember
not only the sharp stabs when I had to turn
but the stiffness that made me keep my arm at my side
and forced me to plan my eating and my sad sleeping.
As far as birds, I am more like a pigeon than a hawk.

I think I am one of those snow-white pigeons with gold
eyes and a candy-corn beak, with a ruffled
neck—a huge white hood—and ruffled
legs, like flowers or long white pantaloons,
shamelessly exposed under my white dress
and hopelessly drooping when I run in
fear and slip and fall on the dirty newspapers.
I fly with shame, when I fly, but mostly I sit
quietly or rise with effort to do my dance,
my head moving back and forth like a loose pendulum.6
The shame of nakedness and the sense of vulnerability it brings is more

than enough to pull you down into a deep melancholy. But there is also the
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shame of the Question. Look again at Durer’s etching of “Dame

Melancholy,” her wings cramped in a too-small space, intent upon the
Great Question, as melancholics are.
It is a poignant moment in human mythic history when Adam is
ashamed and hides. And as soon as he does this, God speaks to him in
questions: Where are you? Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten
of the tree? It is as if, with humankind coming to consciousness, we now live
in a universe with a gigantic question mark imprinted upon it. To be asked
an impossible fateful question is an occasion of acute shame, and the natural
human response is to hide from the question. The really shameful moment,
however, is not when a question is put to you, but when you are put to the
Question—the question always being too large and too painful to be endured,
and the only response is the silent anguished shame of being the inadequate,
insufficient answer. Where are you? Who are you? What are you? When will
you be? Do you love? Do you believe? How can you? Rabbi Hillel asked the
Great Questions two thousand years ago: “If I am not for myself, who will
be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”
From the deepest shameful place in my own soul I must find some
way to act, to speak out against things that wound me and my world, mindful
that I must do so precisely because I am ashamed, because I am human. I do
not have the inexhaustible strength and omniscience of a god. I do not have
any answers for the most important questions, neither the question I am to
myself nor those that are put to me from the world around me. Inadequate
to the task and often overwhelmed by my own paralyzing melancholy, I must
still offer the remnants of insight and sometimes frayed empathy to my
patients, I must still write a letter of protest to the newspaper editor, march
at a political rally, tend a sick animal, love when I am too angry and weary.
The more important the task, the more my inadequacy, impatience,
and occasional lack of genuine concern all betray the shame I feel somewhere
in my deepest being, that I am insufficient. My insufficiency is not relative
to the task; it is an a priori condition, in which I know at the beginning I
will likely not be able to rise to adequate, let alone suprahuman, heights. I
fly with shame, when I fly, but fly I must, and though I have trouble steering
a course, one wing will have to do.
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In the days of the Inquisition, persons suspected of heresy were

interrogated by torture, the favorite instrument being the rack. If you failed
to answer, or failed to answer correctly when questions of faith were put to
you, the rack was turned a little more and you were slowly—very slowly—
torn apart. The question became indistinguishable from the rack, since both
tore you apart—so that a splendid euphemism arose for this torture: being
“put to the rack” came to be spoken of as being “put to the question.” The
victim was stripped naked and bound to the rack, and the questions began.
But once you were accused, no answer could satisfy the fiendish logic of the
Inquisitors: if you protested your innocence, you were lying and torture was
necessary to bring the truth out of you. But if you confessed, you were merely
trying to escape justice. Every question was an impossible question. And even
if by some miracle you managed to give an acceptable answer and win the
strained mercy of your Inquisitors, in the end it mattered not at all because
you were already broken for life.
In a sense, every moment of shame is like being put to the Question.
It is a torture because you are the answer, and you know you are not enough.
When put to the Question of faith, of meaning, of love, of loyalty, of
anything too deep to be grasped, how can you not feel stripped, exposed,
racked with shame?
Shame itself is not the question: it is the answer; and the answer is a
confession that one is not enough of an answer. Speaking of one’s shame
helps dissolve arrogance, but while confession is good for the soul, it does
not provide what is lacking, does not fill the void. It remains a confession
of insufficiency.
Only the height of human arrogance would suggest to a wounded angel
that he should straighten up and fly right. Shame is a divine gift reminding
us not only that we are mortals and that the human condition is, among
other things, a wounded condition; it is also a quintessential experience that
deepens human life, that gives the soul the rich texture of wisdom that comes
from constantly rising with effort to do a dance, the humility that comes
from slipping and falling on dirty newspapers, and the empathy of flying
lopsided and painfully with just one wing. The young Icarus of Greek myth,
who was not at all of melancholic temperament, had two fine strong wax-
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and-feather wings but ignored his father’s advice not to fly too high, lest
the sun’s heat melt the wax. Exhilarated by the limitless view from the
sky and the power of his wings, Icarus knew no shame. But as he
approached the Great Sun, the wax began to melt and he fell headlong
into the sea.
Those of us who fly without that modifying, inhibiting, utterly
human sense of shame ought not to fly at all.
SCENE: Long Island: A single excruciating moment in 1953
S
Dame Melancholy’s Sister: Mini-Portrait of the Author
as a Young Girl
hame: when it comes, it comes as a flood, a tidal wave of scalding wet
emotion, drowning me. I know shame kills. Death by mortification.
It still happens, as it always will. Lying wide awake in bed at night, the
darkness pressing painfully on my eyeballs, suddenly remembering some long-
forgotten happening, feeling myself shrink, the salt-shame filling my mouth.
Something I did when I was eight years old. Something I heard when I was
eleven. Something I saw when I was fifteen. Something I said when I was
thirty-one. Something I neglected that proved irredeemably hurtful to someone
just last month. Something I’ve always known.
Though it is a cold winter night and I have set the thermostat down for
sleeping, a light sweat forms on my brow. My bed has become a medieval
instrument of torture on which I am racked. I curl into a fetal position, trying
to keep myself from being torn apart by hot pincers that extract every miserable
piece of me. I bury myself under blankets that suffocate, cannot, do not, hide
me. I try to think of something else, anything else.
To induce sleep, even though I know it is futile, I begin reciting one of
the several pieces I’ve memorized over the years, but the only one I can
remember now—from Shakespeare—begins, “When in disgrace with fortune
and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state ... and look upon myself
and curse my fate.” It does not help to realize that Shakespeare too knew
something of this wretchedness.
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I am now in the last quarter of my life and have a vast collection of shameful
memories. Though they are very painful, and though I dread their uninvited return,
some small weak-voiced part of me wants to keep them alive, seems to understand
it is important to do so. These scarlet, scarring memories have made me much of
what I am, they are part ofthe fabric ofme—what is called “character”—and without
them I would have no substantial, complicated history, no sense of depth, no serious
experience of being human. I would not know anything about love.
How often must these old sins be revisited? Not long ago, I was in a large
bookstore. Passing by the “Self-Help” section, I saw at least a dozen or more books
that promised to tell me “how to get over” shame and guilt, how to build my self-
esteem, offering explanations of the cause of my chronic misery, depression, guilt,
shame. I fled to the poetry section as quickly as I could, as one flees from ugliness
to beauty. Those books, with their unsolicited offer of help, struck me as
condescending and blasphemous. My shame may not amount to much in the
cosmic scale of eternal unforgivable sins, but it’s mine, and worth far more than
the price of all those books.
In 1953 I was eleven years old and in the sixth grade. We were reading
something in class about ancient history and the beginnings of Christianity. It was
the first time I can recall being acutely aware of being Jewish in a Christian world,
and the awareness came in a wave of shame and an irresistible desire to disappear
forever. We were going around the room, each reading a few paragraphs aloud from
our history book The teacher, Mr. Meringolo, whom my mother admired because
she thought him handsome even though he was an Italian Catholic, was a genial
man who never raised his voice and never had to. He was pleased to hear us read.
He did not notice I was dying.
One of the Jewish students, Eve, a beautiful girl with wondrously long honey
blond hair, was reading about Jesus as if this were an entirely unremarkable thing.
But the name “Jesus” was not pronounceable for me. I couldn’t do it. I had no idea
why. All I could see coming was the inevitable moment when it would be my turn
and I would have to read and say the name. I counted the paragraphs ahead to see
if that name would appear in the section I would have to read. Yes. Twice, in fact.
A double dose of death.
Because God is cruel to eleven-year-olds, I suffered through my
two paragraphs, the red heat from my face nearly shriveling the page.
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I was consumed with jealousy that Eve was not only beautiful but could say
the “Jesus” name without dying, inflamed with rage that Mr. Meringolo was
not the benevolent teacher he appeared to be but a monster intent on my
destruction, sick with betrayal that my mother liked him, and in despair that
there was nothing I could do to stop being Jewish. The purest shame
imaginable.
This was shame of a different order from the shame I felt at being
an ugly duckling compared to Eve’s delicate, sweet beauty. And different
too from the free-floating embarrassment I felt about my mother's slightly-
more-than-academic interest in my male teachers (Mr. Meringolo being
the second, but not the last, of a succession of such men). This shame
was precise, deep, exact, and inescapable: it came from a depth much too
far below my tiny, terribly young sense of myself. I knew I was smart,
and I knew I could ride horseback better than anybody in my world or
even in cowboy movies. It was not, strictly speaking, even about me at
all—although at the time it felt only about me. I think it was an ancient,
ancestral sense of shame that rose up in that moment—not to destroy my
sense of self but to give me one. In that moment of suffocating shame I
understood that Jewishness was a most fundamental essence of my
identity, permanent, indelible. I was not the first or only one to choke,
literally and symbolically, on the name of “Jesus.” But none of my father’s
warnings about Gentile prejudice and none of my mother’s attempts to
protect me from it, nothing of what I already knew of the Holocaust,
brought home to me the overpowering experience of discovering that I
was, like them, like the six million dead, a Jew.
This is one of those memories, the scene in that sixth-grade classroom,
that comes back from time to time, more often in recent years, perhaps
because it was such a formative event and because it was so valuable in
anchoring my emerging identity. I can still remember the fear and shame of
it, but I can no longer feel either. And I have become increasingly grateful
that it happened, and happened at such an early age, for it pointed me in
the direction I had to go: to the source of the shame, to the memories, to
the ancestors. Now, fifty years later, I have no idea what happened to Eve,
Mr. Meringolo is probably dead, my parents have joined the ancestors,
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and I write this with a pride that goes deep, right next to the shame that
still rests in that corner of my psyche like a gravestone, permanent marker
of who I am.
The Other Torment: Guilt
Christian theology has interpreted the eating of the forbidden fruit in

the garden as an act of disobedience, but the guilt Adam would be expected
to feel seems not to be much in evidence. We could say that guilt has not yet
fully arrived in human psychology in the third chapter of Genesis. In the tale
of the garden it seems clear that Adam hides not because he feels guilty but
because he is ashamed (naked). The Eden myth illustrates and associates
consciousness and shame, but conscience and guilt are “later” phenomena,
appearing in the second book, Exodus, with the giving of the Ten
Commandments.
The emphasis in the Genesis story is on shame as a primary condition
of being human. This does not exclude guilt, but precedes it and makes guilt
secondary. Shame comes from being—naked being or being naked. Guilt
comes from doing the wrong thing—wrongdoing. The possibility of guilt
increases as laws and commandments increase; a body of law tends to embody
guilt. Further, guilt only becomes real and actual as a psychological experience
when there is a consequence to one’s action: disobedience means nothing
without judgment or punishment.
The response to nakedness is shame; the response to disobedience is
guilt. Psychologically, then, guilt doesn’t arrive until we get to a more
differentiated consciousness, laws and commandments, highly developed egos
to obey the law and highly developed superegos to warn of the consequences
of breaking the law. Guilt has to do with morality and the objective knowledge
of good and evil, while shame has to do with the subjective experience of body
and instinct, creatureliness.
The usual formula for distinguishing guilt from shame is this: guilt has
to do with being good, shame has to do with being good enough. I want to
draw the distinction more sharply by dropping a word: guilt has to do with
being good, shame has to do with being enough. Primal shame has nothing to
do with goodness or badness, which are moral categories; shame is rather a
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psychological condition of insufficiency and inadequacy, and shame is felt most

acutely in experiences of weakness, need, helplessness, and physical sickness.
This is why shame is such a basic and important component of melancholy.
Shame is unspeakable, inarticulate, without and before words. Shame
is spoken most eloquently in the body, in instinctive reactions and gestures:
blushing, hiding movements, the Great Squirm. Guilt is articulate, given form
in words of confession, accusation, blame, moral and legal categories of right
and wrong. One is guilty by the book—the Book of the Law in Judaism, canon
law in Catholicism, the Qu'ran of Islam, law books of government—and you
can have these books thrown at you. After you’re arrested, when your wrong
action is stopped, you are booked.
Where there is no law, there is no guilt. This was the situation in Ovid’s
Golden Age, that nostalgic time of psychic infancy, before we grew up and
became complicated and full of guilt complexes. Here is a description of that
Golden Age from Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
The Golden Age was first, a time that cherished

Of its own will, justice and right; no law.
No punishment was called for; fearfulness
Was quite unknown, and the bronze tablets held
No legal threatening; no suppliant throng
Studied a judge’s face; there were no judges,
There did not need to be.7
No law, no guilt. Our knowledge of good and evil is formulated in law

codes: criminal law codes, canon law, laws of etiquette, even the law of love.
Since law requires endless differentiation of rights, obligations, degrees
of guilt and culpability, it falls to the ego to undertake this task. The task
tends to become heroic—not just because ego does it, but also because our
civil and religious tradition places law as the highest value: no one is above
it. So of course we are all guilty of something at any given time. Given our
culture’s split between the “innocent” and the “guilty” (as if these cannot
coexist in one person), there are always plenty of fingers pointing at an
abundance of culprits, and enough egotism to go around.
One of the values of law is that it forces psychological differentiation
upon us. The shadow side is that law tends to reduce psychological
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differentiation to legalism: then law rings hollow, it is emptied of Eros,

that winged divinity who is the foundation of all ethics and who attends
Love, along with Aides, at her birth. And without Eros we are plunged
into melancholy, burdened with Law but mourning the loss of Love.
As a counterpart to the old Greek tale of Aidos clothing Aphrodite
as she rises from the sea, there is the ancient biblical story that tells how
Moses brought his people to the foot of Mount Sinai,
And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord

descended upon it in fire, and the smoke of it went up like
the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.
And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder,
Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. And the Lord
came down upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain;
and the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and
Moses went up.
And then God spoke to Moses the Ten Commandments, which

were engraved in tablets of stone.8
Whereas Aidos is primal, the biblical image suggests that guilt is

secondary, at the mountain top, where law is given, the word of
commandment is spoken, in the bright light and sharp crackling heat of fire.
Guilt is hard and fixed, like the stone upon which it is engraved, not like
the foam and salty spray and perpetual movement of sea waves. Shame washes
over you in waves, guilt hits hard like a stone.
The spatial relationship of guilt and shame—guilt at the mountain top,
shame down at sea level—suggests that guilt is just that: a top layer, a covering,
a defense (as in defensiveness) against feeling shame, which originates in a
deeper level of our subjective experience of ourselves. But guilt is not a very
good defense; it may help us avoid wrongdoing for fear of the consequences,
but it is no match for the overpowering tidal wave of shame that will break
through (even to the mountaintop) to reveal our essential character. Shame
exposes and reveals who we really are, while guilt results from what we have
done. And while guilt may weigh unbearably heavy on the conscience, it is
still easier to salve the conscience than to change character.
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SHAME AND GUILT
Shame, personified as the goddess Aides, also protects us from the worst
that is in us. She is not destructive; her scorching heat, felt in the fiery blush
and shriveling pain of exposure, is more purifying than punitive. She defends
us in our deepest sense of integrity by not allowing us, through fear of self
betrayal, to go beyond the bounds of ethical conduct, modesty, respect, and
the privacy of intimate love. Aidos protects us from violating ourselves and
others by making us conscious of how inadequate we are to rise to the most
important challenges to our humanity. The old mythic story reminds us that
when she leaves, along with her companion Nemesis, we are left undefended,
for then we lose the sense of our vulnerability and cannot feel the righteous
anger that protects us from shamelessness.
This is not at all to say that guilt is unimportant and that we shouldn’t
feel it. Quite the reverse: in Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman points
out that guilt feelings are psychologically authentic, because the afflictions of
our souls reach us through guilt.9 Guilt becomes defensive and destructive to
soul only when it is taken literally—this is the real failure or sin. Taking guilt
literally means you see only the surface of the literal wrong done, you have
failed to perceive the archetypal pattern in which you are caught, or failed to
perceive the web of entanglement in which the gods have trapped you, so
that all the responsibility for wrongdoing, and all the power to rectify the
wrong, is placed in the ego. You end up in an egocentricity, which creates
more guilt. This is part of the pathology of “depression,” the agitated obsession
with one’s guilt that yields no real insight or movement.
[Guilt] can direct one towards those who have been wronged
or damaged, and demand reparation in the name, simply, of
what has happened to them. But it cannot by itself help one to
understand one’s relations to those happenings, or to rebuild the
self that has done these things and the world in which that selfhas
to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions
of what one is and of how one is related to others.10 [Italics mine]
Both guilt and shame may become pathological when they prevent
each other. Shame becomes a pathology itself rather than an attitude toward
pathology when it is false shame, or secret pride, or inflation. This is the
“I-am-the-world’s-greatest-worm” syndrome.
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Guilt becomes pathological when it prevents shame, covering,

obscuring, repressing it. Then you labor under the delusion that you
have complete control over your actions, and lack nothing but the will
to rectify. All the guilty “if-onlys” belong to this delusion, and also
the self-flagellations of repetitive, compulsive apologies, and firm
resolutions not to do it again. Like starting a weight-loss diet every
Monday, they rarely work, so you are condemned to keep trying to
alleviate the guilt, which just keeps getting worse. This is the “I-am-
the-chief-of-sinners” syndrome. These delusions obliterate the memory
of one’s “broken wing,” making the attempt to straighten up and fly
right pathetic, even when it is possible to do so. Wherever one feels
guilt, one is obliged to look for the heroic attitude in it.
The pathological forms of guilt and shame blur the distinction between
them: shame as secret pride, guilt as disguised heroism. Pathological shame
says, “I am the lowest of the low; no one is as low as I am. I am the worst,
most disgusting example of earth’s vermin. My sex fantasies are utterly
perverted, drinking has destroyed my life, slot machines have cast an
unbreakable spell on me and I am too weak to resist, my night dreams are
full of murder and dark places, my day dreams are full of wild ambitions I
can never achieve. If anyone knew my secrets, they would see I am trash.
But since I am the worst of trash, no one else can claim first place in
trashdom, which is mine alone, and I will not give it up.”
Pathological guilt says, “I feel guilty that I said those terrible things
(even if he did deserve it), but now it is too late—I can never be forgiven. I
feel guilty about lying to her, (but) I wanted to protect her from the truth.
I feel guilty ripping off my employees (but) the profit margin is slipping and
tough decisions are required. I feel guilty that I hit my kid (but) he was
mouthing off, and anyway it hurt me more than it hurt him. I feel guilty
about not visiting my sick grandmother (but) I have so many other family
demands on my time. I feel guilty keeping this rotten secret about what my
brother did to my niece (but) if I confront him, she’ll never trust me
again.”
The heroism in these guilty reactions is obvious in the “but “ qualifier.
The “but” marks the presence of a mitigating circumstance, a justification
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SHAME AND GUILT
for the guilty action or guilty non-action. It signifies that one was put in
an untenable position and left to suffer a heroic martyrdom—incurring
guilt for the sake of an apparently greater purpose.
More subtle and insidious is the kind of guilty feeling for which
there is no justification, no qualifier, no mitigating circumstance. This is
the sort of guilt with which one beats oneself mercilessly for not having
done better, more, or something different, or for doing it wrong, for doing
it, even thinking about doing it. In this morass of guilt it feels as though
the “I” stands alone as originator of the thought and doer of the deed.
The pathology is not in the guilt itself, but in that there is no recognition
of a deeper reality, that powers far stronger than one’s ego have been at
work pushing, inciting, prodding, compelling, demanding that a guilty
deed be done. Behind Orestes’ murder of his mother stands the command
of Apollo, and behind Agave’s killing of her son stands the vengeful
madness of Dionysus.
The gods, as Hillman says, reach me through guilt, sometimes scream
at me to get my attention. But when I arrogate all power to do wrong to my
conscious self, to that relatively small part of me I call “I,” I also arrogate all
power to do right. This makes me, a mere mortal, into a god, and having
made myself divine, I can no longer hear the genuinely divine voice that
has a rightful claim to my attention—and so I will suffer that claim
symptomatically, in the form of guilty worry, anxiety, restlessness,
sleeplessness, poor appetite, reckless driving, sordid or silly compulsions,
myriad ailments and miseries.
One of the psychological values of guilt is that it reminds us of an
obligation. The old English word gilt means “obligation” or “to owe a debt,”
and so it calls our attention to whatever god or goddess we have neglected.
Since the body is the primary organ of shame, it often leads us, through its
pain and affliction, to a realization of the symptomatic guilt of neglect. In
this sense, then, guilt is a symptom, not to be treated as the disease itself
with large doses of forgiveness.
Feelings of guilt, which frequently make us feel emotionally as well
as physically sick, point us to that place in the psyche where we feel ill
and which we call pathological. Psychopathology—literally, “the meaning
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of suffering in the soul”—may be identified as that which brings the sense

of infirmity, or impairment. Wherever one feels sick, distorted, deviant,
wherever one feels the weight of self-condemnation, that is the crack in
the soul where shame enters. Guilty feelings, then, can move you down
to the next dimension, to shame.
The remembrance ofone’s pathologies is what constitutes shame. Memory
preserves shame, for years and years. To remember one’s pathologies, failures,
hurtful mistakes, limitations, broken wings that drag along in the dirt, is to
remember the shame attached to our human condition. No wonder
melancholy is marked by the painful remembrance of things past. Deep
within the blue melancholic mood is the crimson heart of shame.
Alchemically, memory and shame and salt go together, because salt,
like memory, preserves experiences, and like sea-salt keeps shameful memories
alive and moist and still bitter in the mouth even after decades, so that it is
difficult to speak of them. The antidote to guilt is not forgiveness, but shame.
To paraphrase Hillman, pathologies, and the gods in them, ask to be
remembered, not forgiven.11 Remembrance keeps one’s vulnerability, failure,
inadequacy, and insufficiency intact, without burdening or inflating the ego
to rectify them. They cannot be made “right” anyway, because they are not
“wrong”—they are just there.
In short, the way out of the mountaintop vertigo of the guilt-forgiveness
cycle is the way down, to the sea, where shame attends and makes love ready.
Perhaps most important is this: you don’t do anything when you are covered
by and with shame; when it drapes itself over you, it is to be received as a
divine gift and necessity—even if its touch burns. There is no forgiveness of
shame as there is of guilt; there can only be an acceptance of it and, with
enough grace and generosity of spirit, loving it. Loving one’s shame is part
of amor fati, the love of one’s fate. In the sense of Aides, shame is a mantle
of divinity defining the limitations of human being, and is therefore a
prerequisite for true worship.
Here is a paradox: whatever you are ashamed of is also that which is
to be given recognition and even respect, since all our shameful pathologies
carry some strange necessity, or value, or both. (Shakespeare: “The art of
our necessities is strange, that can make vile things precious.”12) That in you
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SHAME AND GUILT
which is shameful and disgraceful is that which is to be wrapped in aides,

grace and respect. Shame is both a wound and a dressing for the wound.
One’s sickness does not need justice, it needs the feather-light touch of
the dark wings of Aidos, who is a daughter of Night, and, in Kerenyi’s
words, guards the secrets that belong to the night.13
Like Hesiod, I end this chapter with a warning, if not a prophecy,
about the loss of shame. There are philosophers and psychotherapists and
all sorts of well-meaning, sunny-dispositioned, sanguine people who want
to cure us of shame and guilt; who tell us not to be ashamed; who
accentuate the positive and want to eliminate the negative; who tell us
we have nothing, really, to be ashamed of; and who see guilt only as an
inefficient method of coping, an obstacle to self-assertion. When these
people proclaim this view, I pronounce this warning: run away from them!
Quickly! They long for that lovely garden paradise before the Fall; they
want consciousness without shame, and law without guilt. But it is not
a lovely garden they would take us back to, not an Eden paradise where
the fruits of “human potential” grow only in good and edible varieties.
No. The place where there is no shame and no guilt is the place of the
Psychopath, who cannot be cured, taught, or changed because he lacks
the sense of shame and the capacity to feel guilt.
When the day comes that you can no longer get the blues or feel
melancholic, that is the day you are lost beyond redemption. Remember:
when Aidos and Nemesis leave and are no longer present among us, we perish
undefended at the hands of the psychopath, the shameless one. If you feel
shame for nothing else, so long as you can feel shame and guilt over this
utterly shameless psychopath in yourself, running loose in your dreams
nightly as the sadistic Nazi, the slippery con artist, the mindlessly happy
manic hero, or the one who is utterly indifferent to shame and suffering,
then Aidos still lives and there is still soul in the world and we will not perish.
Those therapists and lovers of regressive innocence who advertise the
life without shame and guilt are working toward a psychopathic life. No
doubt their intentions are good, but, as my tenth-grade very Catholic
Spanish teacher used to say to students who offered excuses instead of
homework, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” People who
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go through such a course of therapy may very well “get over” a lot of shame
and guilt—but what is left? If such a therapeutic endeavor gives you merely
technological expertise (“skills”) in self-help and relationships, if this is
the highest aspiration and the goal of therapy, if self-help precludes the
self-knowledge that opens the door to Aides, then the ancient Greeks were
prophetically right to worry about the departure of Nemesis and Aidos.
Of course, even those who leave therapy relatively shame- and guilt-free
are not really so: it only needs another failure, another broken love affair,
another broken promise, another compromise of integrity, to bring all
the shame back, full force, hotter than hell, and all the guilt, hard
and racking and colder than the fingers of a corpse.
To lose the sense of shame is to lose sensitivity, compassion, and the
sense of meaning in suffering. And one loses perspective, a sense of one’s
place. Without a sense of shame, all places are alike, none more sacred than
others; we fly crazily back and forth between heaven and earth and hell, unable
to tell the difference. But if we are wounded, and ashamed, then we are each
like an angel with one broken wing, the utterly human caught between
skyward flight and clumsy earthbound dance.
I fly with shame, when I fly, but mostly I sit

quietly or rise with effort to do my dance,
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PART III
ROBERT BURTON’S
DIAGNOSTICKES
Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth,

before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh ...
Oh the blues ain’t nothin’ but a slow achin’ heart disease.

Oh the blues ain’t nothin’ but a slow achin’ heart disease.
Just like consumption, it kills you by degrees.
—“The Blues Ain’t Nothin’ But,”

sung by Ida Cox
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Robert Burton and His Details

SCENE: Dr. Burtons study, 1638
was in the first flower of my youth when I began receiving visits from
I Dame Melancholy, whose countenance, its beauty notwithstanding,

frightened me. In truth, I did not at first think her beautiful, for she
disturbed me with a sorrow for which I then had no words. She filled me
with losses I had not yet borne and griefs that had not yet come, and she
never promised anything that I desired in my heart, of adventure or wisdom
or love. So I retreated from her to my books, which already as a boy became
my refuge, and where I thought to hide from her iron gaze.
As I grew into manhood, the Lady came more often, her requests for
admittance more insistent. Still I resisted her, and grew even more fearful.
In my waking hours I thought of her dark face, where no smile ever appeared,
and the power of her wings, against which, in my mortal frailty, I could not
stand, for I knew their slightest motion could turn a gentle breeze into a
whirlwind and fling me into death. In my night dreams she came to me
wanting nameless things, clawing at me, the way a beggar in the street grabs
at one’s coat and threatens to drag one into the mud. She never spoke in my
dreams, only gestured to me to come with her, to give her—something,
something—and always in these dreams I turned away, in disgust and dread,
and awoke heavily to gray mornings.
And yet, despite these fearful visitations, I found myself drawn to her
mystery. Is it not often the case that we are strangely attracted to what repels
us? I took it in mind to brace myself against the natural proclivity to flight,
and to make an effort to engage her in some way, to urge her to speak to
me—not so much, I confess, because I was willing to give her what she might
ask, but because I wanted to hear her voice, to hear if it was a living voice,
and to discover if she brought a message, which God, in his wisdom, might
wish me to hear.
I was not a hospitable host, and more than once refused her entry when
she called. But with the passing of the years, as I grew to responsible
adulthood and felt too ashamed to be still holding on to the fears of my
youth, I opened my door to her more and more often. And I discovered
that she did, indeed, have a voice—much to my surprise a deep, mellow,
restful voice-—and we began to converse. We spoke haltingly at first, with
reticence, as if we both feared being wounded by the other, I far less
composed than she.
And in time I began to think of her as a kindred spirit, even a sister to
me in temperament and inclination. She was solitary, as was I, and so it
seemed most natural that she should seek me out. Yet my detachment, to
which I clung out of the old fear, felt most unnatural, as if I were willfully
rejecting a necessary organ of my body which had done me no harm. Perhaps
it was her wings, which as a boy I envisioned as weapons; but now I perceived
the softness of their feathers, and that softness bespoke a tenderness that
alarmed me—I, the solitary man of God to whom others turned for strength.
For several years now, I have made it my task to become more intimately
acquainted with Dame Melancholy, to approach her with greater kindness,
and to hear what instruction her words, and indeed her very presence, might
bring. As my faith compels me, I am learning to be more charitable toward
her—an attitude that does not come easily to me, for though I am intrigued
and even entranced by her strange beauty, I am still almost as fearful of her
as I was when we first met, and just as often doubtful that anything good
can come of our acquaintance. She is great and imposing and heavy with
age and wisdom, while I feel myself growing smaller, less certain, more
irritable as my years press relentlessly upon me.
Usually she comes at twilight, after the day’s business is done and my
callers, most often parishioners seeking aid or God’s comfort, have gone to
their own homes. I use my candles sparingly, for I have never had more than
a modest living, and my temperament has always inclined me to frugality. I
have discovered that she looks especially lovely in the dim light, and yet, I
have still not fully rid myself of that old faint tremor of fear, sometimes almost
dread, when she appears. She is still always in need, much like the poorest
of my flock.
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ROBERT BURTON AND HIS DETAILS
In spite of my chronic trepidation, however, I have begun to look

forward to her visits, for I am realizing with great surprise, late in my earthly
life, that even though my friends are dear and I crave human companionship
as I never did before, yet I am most secure with her whose head is crowned
with laurel, most surely anchored in her strength, my soul freest when I feel
the shelter of her wings.
I believe that God has sent her to me because we have need of each
other. And so I write about us in my book, which I have called The Anatomy
ofMelancholy, and have chosen that scholarly title so that readers in this
dawning age of enlightenment will be persuaded of its worth, and not think
it the personal testament and hymn to the Blue Lady that it truly is.
Author’s Commentary on Dr. Burtons Commentary

Details, Details
t is true that God is in the details. So neglect of details is a neglect of God,
I and must surely lead to hell.

The past century has seen an increasing cultural tendency to neglect
particulars. We no longer pay attention to the details that make life full, rich,
purposeful: the details of language, which is becoming increasingly imprecise
and slipshod; the details of manners, which bring a non-violent ritual
aesthetic to common human interactions; the details of sensuousness, which
makes our reality something more than merely virtual; the details that emerge
in slow motion, the absence of which turns the fast-paced life of the twenty-
first century into a mind-numbing blur.
In the end, what one remembers of a loved person is not so much the
grand scope of achievement or vague impressions of appearance, but the fine
curve of a wrist, a particular turn of the mouth, a unique manner of speech,
the singularity of an eye that has looked into you and seen all your details.
And what one remembers of a loved thing (a painting, a snatch of poem, an
old toy, all the knick-knacks picked up in the course of a life) are its details,
the shape and texture and dents and scratches that give it character.
I have an old clay piece, unworthy to be called “sculpture,” that I made
in high school. It resembles an old castle turret but was supposed to be an
ashtray. The tray part is so small it holds barely a single flick. It is red clay,
219
rough, small and heavy. It is useless and unlovely. It makes me a little sad to
look at it. Still, I have always kept it close, setting it out on a night table or
mantelpiece or my desk. I have no idea why I do this. It is more than forty-
six years old now, and even less useful, since I stopped smoking years ago.
Small and silly as it is, it holds more associations with my adolescence than
anything else I have, and I would be bereft without it.
One of the symptoms of “depression” is lack of precision, an inability
to get the details. In fact, details become the enemy, dragging one down,
demanding scrutiny and attention, requiring patience. But depression, unlike
melancholy, speaks in vagaries, a monotone of “I-don’t-knows.” What’s
wrong? “I don’t know.” What happened? “I don’t know.” When did this start?
“I don’t know.” What do you want? “I don’t know.” What do you need? “I
don’t know.”
Robert Burton has both precision and details, hundreds of pages of
them. Probably no other work in English pays more attention to the details
of melancholy than Burton’s Anatomy. Though more than 360 years old, this
venerable text stands alone in scope, wit, and erudition about the melancholic
condition. Burton apparently read everything that had ever been written
about melancholy and quotes most of it—in Latin, which makes for slow
reading, even if you know Latin.
Burton assumes certain fundaments about human physiology and
psychology that we modern folks would likely find laughable—such as the
medical theory of humors and the peculiar effects of certain foods on one’s
mental disposition. Burton also assumes that the movement of the planets
and the stars, the Sun, and the Moon, influence human behavior and leave
their stamp on individual character. But while astrology in our time has been
relegated to the entertainment section of the daily newspaper, for about five
thousand years it was a sophisticated psychotherapeutic art, practiced by
skilled “readers,” probably at much more affordable fees than you pay these
days for less reliable diagnoses.
However, if we read Burton’s work not literally but with an imaginal
eye and an ear for metaphor, it becomes a treasure trove of insights and useful
ideas for understanding the miseries of melancholy. Some of his suggestions
and remedies are not just antiquated cartoons, but have a foundation in
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medical science after all, only recently re-discovered, and a solid grounding
in the workings of the human psyche.
The Causes ofMelancholy According to Burton
The “cause” of something does not necessarily explain its meaning; what
causes melancholy does not answer the question of what it means to be
melancholic. And even if a cause cannot be found, one’s melancholy is no
less meaningful. When Robert Burton set out all the “causes” of melancholy
in his Anatomy, he apparently hoped to find meaning by finding cause.
Whether he succeeded or not is a secret buried with him, but his method is
still useful, with a caveat: we are not to take his work literally. If we read the
Anatomy psychologically—as a compendium of images of melancholy and
its symptoms—we might find three centuries falling away, and discover the
surprising degree to which much of Burton’s vision of Dame Melancholy
illuminates the experience of our present-day visitations from her.
All the “causes” of melancholy arise from the figure of Saturn/Chronos,
who is the god most closely associated with melancholy. Melancholics are
his “children” and receive their saturnine temperament as an inheritance
from him. The attributes, stories, and astrological and alchemical
associations of and to Saturn all speak of and to the condition of melancholy:
his element is lead; his color is black or gray; he is old and dried up, like a
prune or an old man. Time, chronic illness, aging, miserliness, slowness,
limitation, fate, karma, the swallowing of children, and misogyny (an
attitude which women may also hold) all belong to Saturn. The parts of
the body and afflictions governed by or associated with Saturn are: the
spleen, black bile, bones and head, bladder, skin and body hair, the right
ear and deafness, dizziness; all slow diseases (rheumatism) and fevers, chronic
conditions, any inhibition of function (the rings around the planet suggest
this inhibiting effect) such as laming, impotence, speech defects,
constipation; and all waste products—feces, urine, gallstones, rheum from
the eyes and nose. Those early-morning creakings of bones as you age, the
increasingly frequent fits of irritability, the chronic worry about whether
your assisted-living insurance coverage is adequate, and a nagging doubt
that while the sun may rise tomorrow, you might not—all these are some
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of the ways Saturn makes his divine presence known in your life. A god of
melancholy, indeed!
Three Primary “Physical” Causes
Burton says there are three factors, of a physical nature, that cause
melancholy: birth under the sign of Saturn; old age; and parents.
First Physical Cause: Birth under the sign of Saturn

Those with the Moon, Saturn, and Mercury “misaffected in their
geniture,” says Burton, are “at risk” for melancholy. Just as the theory of
humors described how a person could have this or that predominant humor,
or disposition, so the astrological theory of planetary influences provided
the same explanation or description in a complementary metaphor. Jung’s
theory of archetypal patterns recognizes the same phenomenon: the basic
characterological structure—the psychic constitution of an individual—is
at least partly given at birth and influences the course of one’s life as fate.
Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century physician-alchemist, insisted that no
disease, not even a simple toothache, could be cured if the doctor had no
knowledge of the stars (or archetypal influences), and he thought that the
primary cause of melancholy was the stars rather than the humors. “The
constellation alone,” he says, “many times produceth melancholy, all other
causes set apart.”1
No “blank slate” nonsense for Paracelsus, Burton, Jung. Even though
parents are one of the three “primary causes” of melancholy, this other
primary cause relieves them of total responsibility—an idea which should
bring both enormous relief and deflating disappointment to parents. It can
be welcome news to parents who blame themselves every time their child
goes “wrong”; but it also means you don’t get all the credit when your child
shines. The “nature/nurture” argument is resolved in this view also: the
question is not whether nature or nurture determines the personality, but to
what extent nurturing affects a given psychic nature. Some stars appear in
constellations more frequently than others, some are “mutable” and some
are not, some are “close to earth” and some are not.
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To be born under the star of Saturn is to be born a melancholic. The

presence of Saturn in any horoscope bodes melancholia, and so Saturn’s
presence was always thought to be inauspicious, at least until the Renaissance.
Then the philosopher Ficino insisted on placing the beneficial aspects of
Saturn right next to his undesirable ones, making them equal in value. But
still, the notion of Saturn as a malevolent planetary influence persisted. Even
his “virtues”—self-control, tact, thrift, caution—are not exactly the stuff that
win Mr./Ms. Congeniality awards. The words themselves suggest inhibition,
holding back or withholding; necessary virtues, perhaps, but not beautiful.
Saturn’s virtues explain rather than help the saturnine person’s “vices”
(suspiciousness, paranoia, emotional withholding, stinginess).
And yet, one of the paradoxes of Saturn’s nature is that we may come
to deeper self-understanding under his difficult tutelage. Saturn is the
quintessential god of introspection, and particularly melancholic
introspection. As the god of prisons, he locks us inside his rings, those lethal
zones of paranoid defensiveness, and his gravitational pull binds us to the
rock-hard, inescapable reality of our real character. In Saturn’s realm there
is no parole from one’s fate. But, at the same time, the “keeper of the keys,”
as he is also known, unlocks that innermost knowledge of who we truly are
and what we are meant to be. It is through him that we learn what our
inescapable fate, or character, really is. His downward pull draws us deeply
into ourselves as we are willing, or forced, to go, and what we learn there—
like it or not—can free us from self-delusion.
The best (“most generous”) kind of melancholy was thought to come
in the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Libra. Here, the leaden, oppressive
inhibition of ringed Saturn would be balanced (in the scales of Libra) by
Jupiter’s hearty, expansive optimism. We might expect this sort of “mild”
melancholy to have more of a bittersweet-nostalgic-reflective quality,
something very different from the desolation of acedie. The mood so often
induced by the funny-sad comic genius of Charlie Chaplin is a good example
of this “generous melancholy.”
The worst melancholic condition results from a meeting of Saturn and
the Moon in Scorpio. They are natural enemies, and they meet in the sign
ruled by the god ofwar, Mars. Saturn, the “dry” planet, the misogynist, whose
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element is lead and whose distant face is always dark, here meets the Moon, a
“wet” planet, a female divinity whose element is silver and whose nearer face
shows us soft reflected light. He is very large, she is very small. Each has its
own particular style of “madness”: Saturn afflicts with melancholy, the Moon
seduces into lunacy. We stare at a bleak, arid psychic landscape from within
Saturn’s consciousness, but we see mysterious things and shifting shapes in
the silvery light of the Moon. While they are profoundly different in their
natures, and apparently hostile, they nevertheless have a hidden affinity for
each other; just as the alchemists found that silver was “hidden” in lead (having
the same essence and value as shown in their color and malleability), so Saturn
and the Moon, too, have a hidden affinity. When they meet in Scorpio—on
the psychic battlefield ruled by Mars—the melancholy of Saturn meets the
lunacy of the Moon, and one is stung by a double madness.
Such a constellation of Saturn and the Moon in Scorpio means deep
internal war and conflict, exhausting and agitated melancholia. For those
who are in this psychic “constellation”, victory means not conquest over inner
demons, but a cessation of hostilities. And if not a lasting peace, then a truce
will have to do.
Second Physical Cause: Old Age

According to the theory of humors, the tendency toward melancholy
increases with age, since each humor gains ascendancy in, or governs the
quality of, certain periods of life. As one passes through phlegmatic childhood
to sanguine youth to choleric prime, so the black bile gains ascendancy in
melancholic old age.
In this vision of the four-stage life, each stage characterized by a
qualitatively different humor, melancholy is not a pathology; rather it marks
a natural shift in one’s psychological concerns. Jung thought that the second
half of life—which is primarily a qualitative, rather than literally
chronological, state—brought questions, worries, and demands different
from those of the first half, and these concerns, in the older language, might
properly be called melancholic: deep questions of one’s character, fate,
loneliness, limitations of illness or poverty, and imminent death. If the
melancholic humor is not well-tempered, the old doctors would say, these
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matters could easily cause one to degenerate from the natural melancholy of
old age, which may be marked also by reflective wisdom, to the obsessive
preoccupation with being merely old. The Beatles, when they were young,
anticipated the questions:
When I get older, losing my hair,

Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine.
If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?
Burton says that old age brings a “natural melancholy”; and those
temperamentally disposed to it already begin to experience “artificial
melancholy” between ages thirty and forty. Of course one would expect
aging to turn one melancholic, because aging naturally brings nostalgia,
memories, and memorials of failed love and lost dreams, as well as a
stiffening in the joints and a general sense of disrepair—those ingredients
that make for a most melancholic stew. But we should not think that
“artificial” here means false; it is, rather, that which is made by art, before
nature works the same effect. Melancholy, at whatever age, has all the
characteristics, effects, and symptoms of old age: crotchety crankiness,
fixed opinions, earned wisdom, infantile demands, and a deeply religious
attitude toward life.
It is not just old people who are melancholy (and then not all old
people). The parts of one’s soul that are old are melancholy. Anything of
long standing, that has become chronic, shows the influence of Saturn/
Chronos, god of time, chronicity, history, and melancholy. That which
recedes into the past and becomes history tends to darken with age, to dry
out and shrivel, like a mummy. The past is dark and dark gray, like the stones
of old medieval buildings, oppressive and yet alluring, often sadly beautiful,
and it weighs heavily upon melancholics of any age.
“Old age,” says Burton, “being cold and dry, and of the same quality
as melancholy is, must needs cause it, by diminution of spirits and
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substance, and increasing of adust [dried] humours.”2 So aging, like

melancholy, is a drying process, drying up of sexual juices (though not
necessarily of the sexual imagination), drying out of youthful immaturity,
drying out the damp emotionality of unreflected youthful experience in the
harsh old winter sun.
The aging process is also a drying out of memory, where some memories
simply evaporate and are gone forever, and some are dried for preservation
like fruit, darkened in the heat of drying, but sharply etched as though burned
into the soul. These memories are almost imageless emotions, which stir once
in a long while and can rarely be placed in a time or locale in one’s life. Such
memories return to consciousness chiefly through the sensation of smell, as
when on rare occasions I am arrested by the smell of my grandfathers old
horse-barn-turned-garage. Vague memories return also through music, as if
the faintest, oldest melodic scraps, left lying around in psyches basement,
suddenly cause the heart to catch a remembrance of—what? These kinds of
recollections come unbidden, neither by will nor desire, and feel heavily
nostalgic, often bringing a mood of gloom.
The drying-out, or drying up, process that is associated with aging is
visible in parchment-like human skin, in dried fruit, and in the dessicated
leaves that fall in autumn. The flow of blood in women stops when they
reach menopause; this is why menopause used to be called “involutional
(literally, curling inward) melancholia.” “Wet dreams” belong to youth, but
old men dry up sexually. And of course there is the drying up and
dehumidifying of old emotional complexes, the old wounds that no longer
bleed and only rarely cause tears.
Since aging is not only a physical process but also a psychological
experience, it is not exclusive to old people. There are children who are
melancholics by temperament, and we call them “old before their time,”
and “wise beyond their years.” Abraham Lincoln was such a child, and
fortunate enough to have had a mother of similar temperament, who
recognized a destiny in him, and nurtured it in him until her too-early
death when he was just nine years old. Children like these have a serious
demeanor, are precocious, shy, introverted, often talented in one or more
of the arts, and tend to frighten their parents, who, if they do not
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recognize the child’s natural temperament (as Lincoln’s mother did), do

not understand them very well.
In melancholic children the aging process, in its psychic aspect, begins
early; Burton observed that melancholy even assists the maturation process.
The black bile acts like a “bridle” to restrain the other two hot humors (blood
and choler), and “nourishes the bones”—builds and strengthens the basic
psychological structure or skeleton.
The bridling effect is like reining in a wild horse, or harnessing the
passions. In alchemy this was known as reducing the volatility of an active
(usually sulphuric) substance, imaged in the cutting off of the paws of a green
lion. Volatility has always been associated with youth (as the greenness of
the powerful lion suggests unripened or immature passion or desire). So
Burton says that black bile (melan, cholia) in the system makes one temperate
or mature by reducing or bridling volatility, and by directing the passions
with bridle and reins as one would a high-strung stallion or temperamental
mare. Because it tempers the volatile quality of youth, melancholy is
associated with the natural process of maturation.
To allow oneself to be led down to psychic depths by the Blue Lady is
to move toward maturity. Why don’t we hear more about this in the practice
of modern psychotherapy? For several millennia the connection between
melancholy and maturity has been observed, experienced, documented,
rendered in poetry, discussed in philosophy, and affirmed in religious
traditions. Rather than seeing melancholy as a mood to be lightened, we
ought to see it as one of the deepening experiences that brings maturity, that
increases the capacity to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
The capacity to sit in and with one’s misery, not always looking for company
or a way out, is a measure of one’s maturity.
Old age brings dotage, weakness and drying up (unfruitfulness),
slowing and stoppage; but it also brings austere wisdom. This is not at
all the same as having a lot of information or data. It is, rather, essential
wisdom about life and how to live it that comes from long years of
experience and loyalty to one’s own being, years of having been tested
in fire and withstanding the heat. Experience of a life lived fully and
continually reflected upon has cooled and dried and now can be
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preserved to be passed on to a new generation. Heraclitus said, “the dry

soul is wisest and best.” This does not mean one is no longer emotional
or feels nothing; on the contrary, one’s emotional life moves to a deeper
place, made more intense by the dryness, undiluted in strength rather
than watered down, and one is not drowned in wet sentiment, not
wholly identified with one’s emotions. They belong more to the life of
the soul and its concern with meaning than to the ego-world of goals
and various agendas.
I once worked with a Catholic nun, melancholic by temperament, who
was seventy-two years old when we began analysis. She had been in a religious
order for fifty-four years, and wanted to talk with me about the life she did
not live. In my relative youthfulness (I was forty-seven then), I rushed (first
mistake) to the conclusion (a completely wrong one) that she not only felt
deep regret about her life in the convent and in the mission field, but that
she wanted to do something about it, and I felt a sinking feeling that it was
too late—how could she get back fifty-four years of her life? But she had
something very different in mind, and felt something very different in her
wise old soul. At age seventy-two she looked back on a full life without
complaint; but she also had a rich fantasy life in which her many talents—
particularly her gift for and love of writing and literature—might have taken
her in a different direction. This was the reflective, speculative work she
wanted to do with me: imagining experiences she had never literally had but
secretly wondered about, and the unlived life for which she felt a melancholy
nostalgia—for that other life too could have been a vocation—and in doing
this recapitulation of her long life, she was comforted to find that she felt
confirmed again in her first calling to the religious life. We worked together
for just three months. Three years later she published a small, beautiful
volume of poetry.
Though we speak of aging as entering one’s dotage, a period of weakness
and feebleness, we ought not, again, to take this always literally. Along with
a host of ancient “authorities”, Burton recognized that the dotage orfeebleness
is felt in the imagination even before it is felt in the body. Imagination is the
faculty primarily affected by melancholy, and its weakness is a “cause” of
melancholy, even, perhaps, the chief cause.
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What is it like to have an aged imagination? Is it wrinkled and dry like

old skin or leather? Fermented and aromatic like wine? Do you have a whole
museum of yellowed, dried memory-images to revisit, or do you have a bare
walled tomb, a paucity of memories? Is your imagination hale and healthy,
or disabled, or paralyzed? When your body is finally buried, what images will
be buried with you, and what images of you will remain?
Third Physical Cause: Parents

Parents pass on all sorts of characteristics to their children: eye and
hair color, height, intelligence, tendencies to certain body shapes. Lately it
has become scientifically possible to look for “the cause” of nearly everything
in genes: schizophrenia, homosexuality, musical talent, a taste for asparagus,
alcoholism. For whatever hasn’t (yet) been programmed in us through genes,
we tend to imagine a blank slate on which the individual personality will
be written.
However, since the ancient theory of humors did not arbitrarily divide
psyche from soma, it held that parents could transmit character as well as
characteristics. The humoral theory might be imagined as a psychological
counterpart to a literal genetic theory. Hippocrates says the inheritance is
seen not so much “in habit, proportion, scars, and other lineaments; but in
manners and conditions of the mind.”3 Ancestral attitudes are as apparent
in family generations as are physical resemblances; the same complexes and
neuroses that were prominent in great-grandparents may still be alive and
wreaking various levels of havoc in the great-grandchildren. When one of
those descendants feels the bony hand of Fate on her shoulder, such a call is
almost always accompanied by melancholy. It becomes her fate to alter the
ancestral pattern and work out the family pathologies, changing the pattern
of the ancestral inheritance. The sins of the fathers are indeed visited upon
the children unto the third and fourth generation—at least. One of the proper
purposes of depth psychotherapy is not just to heal, to fix, or to solve, but
to retrieve the sense of a meaningful past.
Some people go into therapy and to family and marriage counselors
to “do family of origin work.” The idea generally is to identify the effects
one’s parents (and sometimes grandparents) and siblings have had on one,
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to separate their problems and pathologies from one’s own, and to see how
their actions and attitudes have formed one’s own habitual ways of perceiving
and thinking about the world and one’s personal reality.
But the phrase “family of origin” is misleading. What is a “family
of origin”? The psychological “family” reaches beyond, or below, biology.
I do not originate from my “family”, as if my “family” pre-existed me.
As my parents’ child, I created them as my parents at least as much as they
created me; who is doing the originating? And of what? The linear,
chronological conception of “family” suggests an “origin” that denies the
individual genuine originality. Not every one of our individual quirks,
peculiarities, fears, pains, delights is genetic or even a historical legacy that
originates in our family.
Certainly we are not each entirely or solely the product of our parents.
I am something quite other than the sum total of my parents, and while my
sister and I had dramatically different “roles” while growing up, our lives
are now, and always were, quite a lot more and other than just our “roles.”
For most of us, much of our frustrated expectations and guilt and shame
stems from having the “wrong” fantasy ofourfamily, not the “wrong” family.4
The fantasy images one has of one’s family—the expectations,
dependencies, distorted history, and misremembered stories—are what make
the family “wrong” or cause it to fail one’s needs and hopes. Our inability
to perceive the fantasy of the family we have asfantasy is what sets us up for
betrayal by family or by our failure as one of its members. How many
children, for example, have fantasized that they were “really” adopted by a
family in which they did not feel they were “natural” members? (I fantasized
this for years, and I’m sure I’m in a majority.) The fantasy we have of “family”
is at odds with what is happening to us in that family. How many times
have we as adults returned “home” to visit siblings and aging parents
expecting that this time, this gathering of the clan (at Thanksgiving,
Christmas, a wedding or funeral, a reunion) will be different, better. But if
your fantasy has not changed, then you return to the scene of your childhood,
to the original wound, horrified to find the same reactions, the same
annoyances, the same grievances. You are swept back decades into your old
fantasy of the family as if not a single day had passed.
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The fantasy of one’s family does not yield easily to the “objective” reality
of how that family actually is—and in fact, there is no such reality or
objectivity, because the “family” itself is made up of its members’ fantasies
of each other. To return to one’s family is really to return to the family of
one’s imagination, a tangled skein of images, expectations, frustrations, old
wounds, new surprises, complications of feelings and meanings, subtle
nuances, buried griefs, an endless round of incompatible visions of what this
family is and is supposed to be.
The word “family”, from the Latin familia, originally meant “a
household” of many people, including servants; one could speak of a
“household of servants” as a “family”. The term “familiar” is derived
from the same root, with the same meaning (pertaining to a family or
household), but the additional meanings suggest a certain darkness
inherent in the fantasy of “family”. A “familiar” was also thought to be
a witch’s evil spirit or a devil that possessed the body of a cat or fox; thus,
she was “familiar” with the author and agent of “sin”. It is significant,
too, that a “familiar” was also an officer of the Roman Catholic Church’s
Inquisition, or a person belonging to the “household” of a pope or
bishop. To be familiar with one’s family is to be both an agent of the
devil and a servant of the sacred, at the same time. The fantasy of family
needs to be shifted from literal “family of origin” to psychological
“household,” from the literal persons of one’s family to the psychic
“persons” who are our familiars.
Those “At Risk”, or Most Likely to be Afflicted
Burton lists five categories of people who are most likely to be or

become melancholic. Three hundred and fifty or so years later, his astute
perceptions are, with a touch of imagination, still useful.
1. Those who live in over-hot or over-cold climates

In modern terms, this is what might be called the environmental
influence. An over-hot climate is bad because, as the old theory of humors
had it, too much heat “burns” the liver’s yellow bile and turns it black,
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thus creating a pathological condition; that is, the choleric temperament

becomes choleric-melancholic. Too much cold, however, aggravates the
melancholic temperament (which is already naturally “cold”). This means
a shift from a “normal” melancholic, slightly pessimistic view of life, to
a “depressed” mood, in which pessimism has turned from a philosophic
stance to personal defeatism.
In the United States, for example, it is much easier to be sanguine and
choleric in the southern regions. If you are choleric, for example, Arizona is
your place to be: hot and dry, congruent with your dominant humor.
Sanguine people, those of a “sunny” disposition, should thrive in Florida
and southern California, where it's always warm and ocean-damp, and (at
least in southern California) smiling comes naturally. People of melancholic
and phlegmatic temperaments would be expected to gravitate toward the
cooler climates of the north.
To find out if Burton’s theory is scientifically valid, ask yourself if the
climate in which you live is congruent with your temperament. If it is, Burton
was right. If it is not, Burton was still right, and you should think about moving.
2. Those who are of a “black” complexion, or of a highly sanguine

complexion
This is of course not to be taken literally as actual skin color. Burton
refers to persons whose expression is “dark”, (downcast eyes, knitted brows,
frowning) as having a different temperament from those “light” open-faced
folks who appear to be, as we used to say, “in the pink”. The person who is
melancholic by natural temperament is “at risk” of becoming morbidly
melancholic—a caricature of himself.
However, being of a “highly sanguine complexion” or temperament
does not automatically protect one against the ravages of life. Such a
temperament may become a neurotic defense rather than consciously
protective. Sunny-side-of-the-street residents who never even glance down
the dark alley right next to where they live are very much at risk of falling
into morbid melancholy when their trust is betrayed, their naivety exposed,
and the cold rain of disappointment does not stop for forty days and forty
nights, and more.
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Burton also says that those most likely to be afflicted with melancholy
are those that have “little heads, moist brain, hot heart, hot liver, cold
stomach, and have long been sick.”5 Again, read Burton metaphorically, and
his observations are quite accurate.
Of course people with “little heads” are prone to aggravated (as
opposed to normal) melancholia: their imaginations are minimal and their
small minds are full of intellectual dead-ends and cul-de-sacs. (American
political life, which used to attract some first-rate intellectuals, now
attracts quite a few of these “little-headed” people; no wonder the rest of
us grow more and more melancholic.) They also fit into the “moist brain”
category, as most of their ideas are too soggy to withstand the scrutiny
of hard dry logic. The reason people like these do not appear to be
“melancholic” or “depressed” is that they usually project their intellectual
impotence onto others. They are over-heated in self-importance (hot
heart, hot liver), unable to digest paradox. They bring a cold, disengaged,
iron stomach to communal life, and unconsciously turn this same cold
psychopathic attitude to their own souls. Or maybe, having a “cold
stomach,” they are scavengers, consuming garbage wherever they find it.
Remember the old dictum: you are what you eat.
3. Those who are solitary by nature, who are great students, are
contemplative, and live a life out of action
This is a nicer way of designating what in my adolescence were
known as wallflowers: those who are smart but not too pretty, are too
serious and not much fun, and never get picked to be on anybody’s gym
team. These are the people who are usually very introverted, who have a
tendency to be social, if not religious, ascetics. In American culture,
introversion is considered more or less pathological, antisocial, un-
American, even though educators have long known that introversion is
a trait common to scientific as well as artistic genius. As it was for the
ancient Greeks, for Burton, and now for us, there appear to be two
possibilities: either the nature of the pursuit (contemplative solitude, the
introverted life of the mind) makes one melancholy, or, the natural
melancholic disposition leads one into these pursuits.
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Historically, as we have seen from the ancient theory of humors, this

category of people has always been most identified, and expected to be
afflicted with, melancholia. The equation of melancholia with greatness is
clearest when applied to persons whose solitary nature leads them “out of
action” and into thought. It is, of course, a recent prejudice that to be out
of the action means to be out of life. A civilization which prides itself on
progress and condemns regress, and that consumes a disproportionate
amount of energy in manic extroversion and oil, is primarily interested in
action and getting things done—fast. It is not interested in philosophy
(literally, “love of Sophia,” that is, “love of wisdom”).
Contemplation, the activity of thinking deeply into the sacred (Latin,
templ(um), “temple, shrine, area for observing auguries”), an activity
associated with reflection, intelligence, and spiritual life, has been reduced
to ego psychology’s mental world of “problem-solving.” Problem-solving is
where “the action” is these days; we do not seem to be able to just sit still
with a dilemma. It seems not to occur to most of us that problems can be
contemplated as well as, or instead of, solved. Indeed, our culture’s goal-
oriented, get-on-with-it attitude and cause-and-effect thinking forces every
subject to become a problem, accelerating a manic search for solution. Bumper
stickers give us only two options: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re
part of the problem.”
It may be that contemplation is fearful because it inevitably leads to
contemplation of one’s own death, a subject that would not make the top
ten most comforting themes in any poll. Being literalists at heart, and thus
susceptible to magical thinking, we think contemplation of a thing leads to
the doing of it. Best not to begin at all. This is one reason why even therapists
are often afraid—or at least “uncomfortable”—when talking with a client
who is contemplating suicide, an attitude that can make it difficult for them
to talk about it psychologically and without being defensive.
4. Men are more often afflicted with melancholy, but melancholic

women are “far more violent, and grievously troubled.”6
Burton, being a melancholic, was very possibly also a misogynist—
whether he knew it or not. Misogyny goes with the territory, so to speak:
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not only because melancholics are ruled by woman-hating, dirty-old-man

Saturn, but because, in the traditional construct of masculine/feminine
descriptors, melancholy is an essentially feminine mode ofpsychic life. (And
yes, women who accept their culture’s higher valuation of men may harbor
a secret or unconscious misogyny.) In a male-oriented culture which
attributes “feminine” qualities to the psyche, the psyche then becomes
something threatening, heavily suffocating, and maddeningly mysterious.
It is no accident that Melancholy has nearly always been portrayed as a
woman. She is a Lady, not a Gentleman, and a very difficult Lady to love.
She has her own beauty and grace, dignity and great worth, but her demands
are equally great, and it is no surprise that few want to marry her.
Whether Burton was really sexist or not, his observation is amazingly
accurate after all these centuries. It still seems to be the case that in men,
“depression” is thought of as a vaguely natural, almost dignified, possibly
even romantic, part of their masculine activities: after all, the burden of
running the world must weigh heavily on their shoulders. Melancholia
is a tradition among statesmen, who deplete (“sacrifice”) themselves in
service of their country. One thinks of Lincoln, chronically melancholic
(and sometimes suicidal) from childhood (and fortunately for the country,
untreated), stoically leading the Union through civil war; and Churchill,
heroic leader during the dark days of wartime in England, suffering with
periodic severe bouts of melancholia; and Woodrow Wilson’s unsmiling,
lean, sharp profile pointing idealistically but failing to make the world
safe for democracy.
Any man who enjoys or feels compelled to follow the vocations of
poetry, intellectual leadership, or religion will feel the clutch of melancholy
“seizures” from time to time: it is in the nature of the melancholy and
the vocation, and these all find an affinity in the darker regions of the
human soul.
But the women: “far more violent, and grievously troubled.” This
is not just Burton’s misogyny speaking; there is a psychological truth in
it. The “violence” Burton perceived as characteristic of melancholic
women came to be known as “hysteria” two hundred years later, a
slightly gentler term. Depth psychology has known for a long time that
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“hysteria” in women is a mask for and a form through which women

experience melancholia.
Since women have been historically denied access to and participation
in most of the traditional fields suited to the melancholic temperament
(statecraft, philosophy, theology, poetry, to name a few), their melancholy
is more likely to be private and invisible, somatized and internalized. When
she may not speak her mind, a woman’s body speaks through “hysterical”
symptoms, and her soul becomes agitated and violent in its dreams and
desperate when her spirit is strangled. The modern perception of this
condition has given it an additional indignity, calling it “histrionic personality
disorder,” as if the mask were the real face, as if it were only play-acting rather
than true theater.
“Hysteria” comes from the Greek word for “womb,” hys/tera, giving
us “hysterical,” (hysterikos), “of the womb.” The Greeks thought hysteria was
a psychological condition caused by a womb that was not in its right place,
that had “wandered.” A hysterical woman was a woman without anchor,
loosened from her psychic moorings, the central organ of her femaleness
adrift, giving her a semblance of weightlessness or flightiness, lacking gravity,
weight, substance.
We ought not to think it unusual or pathological if a woman becomes
agitated, “violent, and grievously troubled” when she is cut off from her
generative, creative power. What is distressing about hysteria is that a woman
loses the sense of substantiality that comes with having generative power
firmly anchored in the body. When the “womb” is in its correct alignment,
a woman can carry “weight,” melancholic heaviness, genuine suffering, and
she gains a sense of substance by carrying to term in her metaphorical womb
whatever it is in her soul that wants to be born.
5. Those who offend in the six unnatural things: diet, retention/

evacuation, air, exercise, sleeping/waking, and perturbations of
the mind
Score one again for Burton: here we are in the early twenty-first century
and still offending in the same six unnatural things, plus quite a few more
Burton would never have imagined. They are not innate, or “natural,” sources
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of melancholia. The six “unnatural” things still appear frequently in reported

symptomatic complaints of contemporary modern persons in therapy for
“depression” as well as in common dream images. They are the somatic loci
of melancholia, and thus provide us with precise metaphors for understanding
the soul when it is blue.
First Unnatural Thing: Bad Diet

This refers to both quantity and content: what you eat and how much
of it. Beginning with Galen, physicians through the ages have condemned
meat, and especially beef, as the worst breeder of “gross melancholy blood.”
Burton insists you can eat beef with any degree of safety only if you are
already healthy, strong, and do a great deal of physical labor; otherwise it
is toxic. And this warning came long before anyone had a clue about
bacteria, E. coli, mad cow disease, and other lethal things hiding in that
juicy hamburger.
Beef, like the humor of melancholia, is “cold and dry,” said the ancients,
so the effect is one of adding like to like: melancholic quality to melancholic
quality. It makes more of the same and thus too much, and keeps Rolaids
in business. But each kind of meat has its own vice: pork is bad because it is
“too moist and full of humors”—and sure enough, the American Medical
Association and nutritionists everywhere tell us it adds too much high-calorie
(moist) fat to the diet. Goat’s meat is “fdthy,” says Burton, venison is
“melancholy already,” and all meats that are hard to digest are condemned.
Milk and milk products (except whey) increase melancholy. These foods,
along with cheese, as you already know, cause constipation, a common
ailment of melancholics.
Alchemically, the whiteness and lightness of milk and dairy products
is an incongruous contrast to the blackness and darkness of the experience
of melancholy. What the old doctors were pointing at is the logical idea that
more whitening (more milk, milkiness, virginal innocence) only binds the
blackness more firmly. You can see this in psychiatric hospitals in the
resistance of depressed patients to “treatment” through white, light, enforced
cheerfulness, and prescribed avoidance of all things contaminated with dark
shadow. This is treatment by opposites (allopathy rather than homeopathy)
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and almost always fails. Innocent milky whiteness, bland platitudes, superficial
“relating,” therapy easy to digest, baby food for thought (turning real
difficulties into pablum)—all these Burton condemns because they constipate
and constrict the psyche.
On the other hand, a preoccupation with one’s melancholy, a constant
gnawing of the bone, wanting always to get to the meat of the matter with
ruthless disregard for the rest of life, is a pathological obsession with and
attraction to misery, just as milkiness signifies a pathological avoidance of
pain. Melancholy as a result of “too much meat” suggests a heroic or manic
approach to suffering, biting off more than you should chew. People who
“eat too much meat” face only shadow, give it excessive attention, unduly
romanticizing and ennobling it.
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, a wonderfully unconventional Jungian analyst
in Venezuela, used to say that people who won’t eat meat won’t face the
shadow. New Age peace-and-love vegetarians miss the point entirely by
advocating a meatless diet for humans. While I share with them a common
outrage at and intolerance of the cruelties perpetrated on the living, sentient
animals we “raise” for food, I do not subscribe to the idea that meat-eating
is wrong in principle. The ethic ought to apply to how food animals are raised
and killed, rather than to whether they should be raised for food at all.
Livestock animals that are well-fed, tended, clean, free to roam, and get their
noses rubbed frequently by affectionate human beings remind us that we,
too, are animals. The idea is not to stop eating meat but to bring a religious
attitude toward eating meat: food animals are to be raised with an attitude
of stewardship, and then sacrificed, not slaughtered.
Second Unnatural Thing: Retention and Evacuation

Of course, some of what goes in must come out, or it causes trouble.
We have already moved into this metaphor via eating and diet. But the old,
old experts say that undue retention—constricted bowels or constipation—
is more likely to cause melancholy than excessive evacuation (diarrhea).
Constriction, inhibition, withholding are some of Saturn’s attributes, and
where he is, there too is melancholy; he is the archetypal figure behind the
saturnine type described by Freud as the anal-retentive personality. Being
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“bound in the bowels,” as the old phrase had it, means to be full of shit, or
(more poetically), full of melancholy.
In addition to fecal matter, the idea of retention and evacuation as a
cause of melancholy includes what Burton calls the “proper use of venery,”
or sex. The evacuation or retention of seed is caused by “Venus omitted”
(disrespect to or neglect of the goddess)—you become dull, heavy, sad (like
Saturn), and timorous if you abstain from sex over-much (retentive), or if
you are promiscuous (evacuative). Burton points out that some individuals
are continually troubled with heaviness and headache because they do not
engage in carnal copulation. (Never mind the Excedrin! Just do it!) The reason
for this is that unspilled seed or undischarged sexual juices spoil and become
toxic, and send up poisoned vapors to the brain and heart. And that is what
makes boys be boys, or men be boys: that prized, innocent, milky white sperm
is really a poison which may detonate in the body, causing acute discomfort
and even death. This is why adolescent boys and “adolescent” men can’t help
themselves and must “discharge” the stuff somewhere. Luckily, as a rule,
sperm are not choosy about where they are evacuated.
Arnold Villanovus, a medieval alchemist, said he “knew many monks
and widows grievously troubled with melancholy, and that from this sole
cause.”7 It was noted that omission of Venus produced a “peculiar kind of
melancholy in stale maids, nuns, and widows.” Burton says they are
“melancholy in the highest degree, and all for want of husbands.”8 It is
interesting to note here that the Middle Ages, known as the Age of Faith
because practically all the Western world adhered to the faith of the Roman
Catholic Church, seem more advanced in their recognition (in principle, if
not in practice) of the medical importance of sex than the later ages of Victoria
in England or the right-wing orthodoxies of contemporary America. The
medieval view, while it condemned almost every kind of sexual behavior
outside of heterosexual marriage (lust, fornication, adultery, homosexuality,
masturbation), and elevated celibacy even above marriage (which was for those
of weaker will), at least still recognized—as the nineteenth century did not—
that female sexuality existed, and that its satisfaction is important to health.
Venus (known to the Greeks as Aphrodite), who manifests herself
primarily in sexual affairs, appears in all the sensuous qualities of life. Her
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erotic, beautifying touch is felt in every hope and plan that reaches its climax
in the imaginative soul. Thus, when she is absent (“omitted”), those
generative dreams and fantasies that fertilize and create the future are
stillborn, without sensual appeal. Psyches erotic longings shrivel without her
touch and become toxic and ugly, increasing melancholic grief, bitterness,
and pessimism, and bringing a deadening sense of sterility.
So it was believed that women and men who chose a life of sexless
devotion to God were those most likely to suffer this “grievous melancholy,”
all that potent sexual juice stopped up, constipated, turned poisonous. It
was a hazard of the religious life not to be ignored. The hundreds of tales
told in the Middle Ages about monks and nuns who went mad or committed
suicide because of the “omission of Venus” are cautionary indeed.
But then, “intemperate Venus” is as bad as Venus omitted. Galen says
that melancholy can be exacerbated by venery; Burton says too much sex
“infrigidates and dries up the body, consumes the spirits, and all who are
cold and dry should avoid it as a mortal enemy.”9 The psychological reason
for this is a fear of too-sudden cooling. Loss of “seed” in orgasm, loss of love
in a relationship that is based too much on gaining a sexual identity, or where
sex is the overly-important focal point, cool one down fast, too fast.
Biologically, a sudden drop in the body’s temperature, too far too quickly, is
fatal. There is a clear correspondence in the psyche, and Aristotle also
cautioned that a person who cooled too fast (from deep disappointment such
as infidelity or deprivation of love) might commit suicide. When betrayal
abruptly turns love cold, when sexual fantasies suddenly freeze, when Eros
flees in pain from harsh, frigid light, one turns cold and dry and feels depleted
or diminished—familiar characteristics of melancholy. One feels spent, empty
of seed or passion. It is the season of the quick Big Chill.
The problem of “venery” is ageless and the relationship between sex
and melancholy has been known for centuries, if not millennia. Just count
the poems or listen to the blues, or the thousands of country-western songs
whose lyrics tell the same sad tale in two-four time. Whether it is a matter
of celibacy or promiscuity, monogamy or serial partnerships, habitual marital
sex or random prostitution, few experiences in life bring one to greater
melancholic grief than love and its favorite physical expression, sex. Certainly
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this is so in a culture obsessed with sex, exalting it on the one hand, but often
degrading its loveliest goddess, Venus, handing her over to pimps, tabloids,
and porno flicks, on the other.
Third Unnatural Thing: Bad Air

Hot air produces artificial melancholy, whereas cold air produces
natural melancholy. As we have seen in Burton’s idea of the effect of over
hot or over-cold climates, so there is a correspondence between cold air and
cold black bile, a natural affinity. In colder northern countries, Burton notes,
the people are generally “dull, heavy, and there are many witches.”10 But in
our day we have to consider not only the temperature of the air, but its
breathability: we must add air pollution as a modern producer of melancholy.
Again I borrow from alchemy to understand “air” as the element of
imagination, or fantasy, or imaginative thought. “Bad air” means bad
imagination, imagination that is starved (poor diet), constricted (retentive),
and atrophied by an unloving attitude (omission of Venus). The classic
symptom of “depression,” an impoverished imagination, means that one has
too few images, only one or two thoughts that keep turning on themselves,
closing in, oppressing. Bad air, can’t breathe.
“Bad air” refers also to environmental constriction, or a cultural
atmosphere that is hostile or not conducive to healthful activity. Factories
spring first to mind, where the main enemies are noise, tedium, sometimes
chemical pollutants, and the individual’s reduction to coghood as an
infinitesimal dot on an assembly line that has neither beginning nor end.
Some uncongenial environments are invisible, yet the pressures they exert
are just as real and just as deadly. Tillie Olsen (in her book Silences) has
collected the words of women—some known, many not—who were born
to write but whose art was suffocated by bad air, that coffin-like oppression
that forced them into other “roles” (as wives, helpers, mothers), or who were
able to write against great odds but still in some profound psychological
way were stunted, held back, choked. The struggle to live occupies women
at the expense of their art, whereas generally for men the struggle to live is
also their occupation as artist. Novelist Katherine Anne Porter summarized
the situation economically: “I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of
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my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head

above water.”11
Fourth Unnatural Thing: Immoderate Exercise

This fourth unnatural thing refers to immoderately much exercise or
immoderately little. “Melancholy is an inseparable companion to such as
live at ease.”12 This may be where the idea of keeping busy and “occupational
therapy” originated as a “cure” for darkened mood. And there is no question
that the profound torpor that may accompany a melancholic fit can be of
great harm to both body and soul. One literally stops moving.
The old authorities say that idleness of the mind is worse than that of
the body. So we must remember to think of exercise as pertaining to mental
muscles even more than bodily ones. The primary danger of a mind idling
is that idleness breeds paranoid suspicion and envy, two long-recognized
characteristics of the melancholic or saturnine temperament.
There is also a caution here about voluntary solitariness: to those given
to melancholy, the solitary life is pleasant at first. Melancholics have always
been averse to too much company, particularly when they are engaged in
creative work. Most writers generally require solitude, for example. But in this
voluntary solitude, one may easily begin to waft upward and away. “A most
incomparable delight,” says Burton, “it is to melancholize, and build castles
in the air, to go smiling to themselves.”13 Incomparable is the sweetness of
meditating, contemplating, gazing into space and there seeing the interior
vision. The danger is that one begins to “fly” on wings not made to bear one’s
weight—one lifts off, becomes flighty and ungrounded. And the fall back into
the world and human company, when it inevitably comes, is far, and hard.
Fifth Unnatural Thing: Sleeping and Waking

“A melancholy man cannot sleep overmuch.”14 Here, sleep is the
replenisher, the restorer, the protector and conserver of vital energy. If you
spend too much of your time awake, the lack of sufficient sleep causes
“dryness of the brain, frenzy, dotage,” and makes the body dry and ugly.
Think of how you feel when you are exhausted from three straight days of
trying to fill out your income tax forms, or from hours of trying to assemble
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an item from the store that said optimistically on the box, “some assembly
required,” or from absorbing too many sense impressions from the day, and
think of how this makes you irritable, frenzied, and ugly, those bags under
your eyes, your whole body sagging into an ungainly heap.
According to Burton, sleep is good and more sleep is better. An
additional advantage to more sleep is that you have the opportunity for more
dreams, which connect the waking personality (“ego”) with deeper realms
of psychic activity. And sometimes dreams are the only good entertainment
a melancholic can look forward to, and for free. Of course, the opportunity
for nightmares is also increased, but these are even more valuable than
“ordinary” dreams because they point to something of great importance
happening in the unconscious psyche.
However, if you are that type of melancholic person that tends toward
a phlegmatic attitude, cold and sluggish, then be on your guard against too
much sleep. Sleep, Burton continues, “dulls the spirits ... and senses, fills
the head with gross humors,” causes “distillations, rheums, great store of
excrements in the brain.” I can hardly add anything to this dire warning.
The worst thing about insomnia is that you stay awake longer to know how
depressed you are. The worst thing about sleeping too much is that it makes
you want to sleep more and more. Fortunately, there is an old blues song to
sing for either occasion.
I woke up this morning with the blues all ’round my bed,
Went to eat my breakfast, had the blues all in my bread.
If you ever been down, you know just how I feel,

Feel like an engine, ain’t got no drivin’ wheel.
I got the blues so bad it hurts my feet to walk,

I got the blues so bad, it hurts my tongue to talk.
Or you can sing your own.
Sixth Unnatural Thing: Passions and Perturbations ofthe Mind

Though last in the list, this is perhaps the most important of the six
unnatural things. For while the other five deal with the body as a primary
factor in melancholy, all philosophers agree in effect that melancholy begins
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with either the soul or the mind, and only secondarily affects the body. Plato taught
that all the mischiefs of the body proceed from the soul, and Philostratus
believed that the body is not corrupted but by the soul. Burton says, in
summary: “The fountain of all our grievances is a disordered imagination.”
And he says that the greatest cause of melancholy is imagination: “Great is
the force of imagination, and much more ought the cause of melancholy to
be ascribed to this alone, than to the distemperature of the body.”15 This is
important because the “perturbations” originate in the imagination.
Anyone who feels a great passion (literally, “suffering,” from the Latin
passio), in love, for justice, through art, already knows how great an affliction
it is “to suffer in the mind the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”16
As a cause or source of melancholy, the power of the imagination is more
than sufficient.
Burton subordinates all passions to six primary ones: love, joy, desire,
hatred, sorrow, and fear. But sorrow is called “the mother and daughter of
melancholy, her epitome, symptoms, and chief cause,” according to
Hippocrates; and: “When grief appears, all other passions vanish.”17 Without
getting stuck in reductive and literal thinking about how many passions there
really are and which ones are primary, anyone who has suffered any or all of
these passions knows how acute and obliterating they can be. And these six
passions are not all: consider also the “perturbations.” Shame and disgrace
break noble spirits, and envy is a crippling disease. Women especially, notes
Burton, have no medium between love and hate. Anger is a temporary
madness, but again, women are most prone to anger (especially if they love
or hate overmuch, or fall prey to envy). And of course there is covetousness,
the “pattern, image, epitome” of all melancholy, says Burton.18
Such afflictions tend to deepen the experience of melancholia; when
you are trapped in a strong passion and implacable perturbation, supportive
humanistic therapy is not likely to warm the chilled cockles of your heavy
heart. The sorrowful melancholic does not wish to hear about his or her
human potential, which is off in the unimaginable future anyway. The “how,”
and even more bitter “why,” of getting up in the morning is the more
pressing, immediate, life-or-death question.
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One serious problem of modern psychotherapy, especially when it butts

its smiling head up against the dark frown of melancholy, is that it cannot
recognize real passion in the soul any more. Passion has become trivialized
into ego discomfort, as if the great passions for justice, or excellence, or music,
can be reduced to (explained as) inadequate nurturing one received as a child,
or as compensatory to some childhood trauma. Passion moralized as
“negative” and trivialized as referring only to an ego-state will surely produce
de-melancholized “depression,” for it is a trivialization of the soul. The
humanistic psychotherapy schools tend to inflate the importance of emotion
at the expense of serious, deep thought; the cognitive behaviorists tend to
inflate the importance of thought at the expense of passionate feeling. If we
ever come to wonder where “greatness” has gone, we ought to look first at
how we regard the suffering of the passionate soul.
Burton wisely points out that it is not just that life is wearisome and
full of afflictions; he reminds us that consciousness ofhow life really is makes
one weary of life. It is wearisome to think that one can never be secure but
always in danger, sorrow, grief. In a passage that anticipates the “twice-born”
pessimist, or “sick soul” of William James, Burton writes:
In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a

desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, etc., full of filthy
puddles, horrid rocks, precipitums, an ocean of adversity, an
heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake and
follow one another, as the sea-waves; and if we escape Scylla,
we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour,
anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to
another, undergoing a hard bondage, and you may as soon
separate weight from lead, heat from fire, moistness from water,
brightness from the sun, as misery, discontent, care, calamity,
danger, from a man.19
And Franz Kafka, the haunted Jew of Prague, who died at forty-one,
writing to his beloved Felice:
Felice, beware of thinking of life as commonplace, if by

commonplace you mean monotonous, simple, petty. Life is
merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my
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inmost self perhaps all the time—I doubt whether I am a

human being.20
A Further Note on The Role ofInheritance
According to a long tradition in Western culture, and noted by Burton,

inheritance, or the remembrance of one’s family and heritage, is one of the
primary factors that produce a melancholic temperament. As if he had just
read today’s newspaper, Burton gloomily comments: “It comes to pass that
our generation is corrupt, we have many weak persons, both in body and
mind, many feral diseases raging amongst us, crazed families, our parents
are our ruin, our fathers bad, and we are like to be worse.”21
Those psychiatrists and psychologists who subscribe to an essentially
materialistic and reductive view of the psyche, and who tend to lose the nuance
of melancholy in the concretism of depression, would have us believe that
melancholy lives in certain collections of brain cells or microscopic entities
like genes, and is transmitted through them. This means that if the parent is
prone to melancholy, the child is “at risk” of “getting it,” particularly as passed
from mother to daughter. In this view, melancholy has its own physiology, a
literal and material component; it is an actual “thing.” Melancholy here is
not mood, but entity. Like a virus, it travels, ominously, unseen. Exactly how
this psychic disposition is transmitted by heredity is unclear, although this
difficulty has not slowed the pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic march
to fight, relieve, alter, soothe, lighten or eliminate “it”.
If there is a genetics of inheritance, there must be a psychology of
genetics, or a psychology of inheritance—that is, a way of understanding
the “genetic theory of depression” as a fantasy of the soul about the origins
of its melancholy.
The theory of transmission of depression through genetic inheritance
assumes that depression is transmitted in a literal, biological way. At best, I
find this theory boring and deterministic. The gene theory tends to obscure
the resulting uniqueness of any particular mating, the once-only result of
parental genes that is more than just a continuing generational pattern and
quite a bit more than the sum total of all the genes one inherits. From my
mother, who was not arrogant or inconsiderate and scored only average for
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greed, I’m sure I inherited a penchant for romantic nostalgia, but I do not
believe there is a gene for romantic nostalgia. From my father I inherited a
disposition to sullen angry moods. But the precise and specific quality of my
melancholy is my own.
While there is statistical evidence of a higher incidence of mother
daughter pairs among those diagnosed with depression than of other pairs,
this finding is more interesting for its feminist interpretive possibilities than
for its scientific applicability. A psychological approach to understanding such
statistics may lead us to imagine “depression,” or more precisely melancholia,
as an experience of one aspect of the archetypal dimension of “nature.” This
is the experience of the mother as earth when it is not green but brown and
bare, when it is grieving, a place of burial, of irreparable and recurrent loss.
This is the experience of the earth mother in the form of Demeter, who loses
her beloved young daughter, Persephone, to Hades, Lord of the Underworld,
and leaves the world cold and barren in her wintry grief.
The story of Demeter/Persephone may serve as the backdrop against
which modern descents into depression are forced (Persephone’s abduction)
or avoided, (Demeter’s refusal to accept her loss), and whether they are
experiences of fruitless grief (Demeter’s long mourning) or lead to some
profound psychological transformation in the depths of the psyche
(Persephone transformed into the Queen of the Underworld).
In the old Greek myth, on a fine spring day the lovely adolescent
Persephone is playing innocently among the flowers, the pride and joy of
her mother, Demeter, She who brings forth all manner of nourishment and
sustenance from the Earth. Suddenly, from the Underworld, its Lord, Hades,
erupts through the surface of the earth, seizes Persephone and abducts her
to his dark, colorless kingdom, where all the souls of the dead reside. Demeter
is stricken with inconsolable grief, and sets out to roam the wide world in
search of her daughter, her younger self, her other half. So great is Demeter’s
rage and mourning that all the Earth suffers, all those who depend on Her
for life: it is the time of barren, cold, heartless winter, when the sun is pale
and hangs low in the sky, when the light is weak and gray, the days sliced
short. Nothing grows. It is a time of lethargy, a time of hard-to-find warmth,
and time itself seems to freeze and stop.
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This ancient Greek myth is a starkly accurate image of the quality of

depression with which much of our modern culture is afflicted, and serves as
a psychological background against which we might understand the statistics
and research and assorted scientific findings linking the “inheritance” factors
of depression in mother-daughter pairs. For Demeter is perhaps the best image
for the kind of depression that can be distinguished from melancholy: she
wanders and finds nothing, she has an aversion to and is fearful of depth
(although that is where her treasure, her daughter, her other self, lies), her
suffering feeds upon itself but bears no fruit, she turns barren and uncreative.
Her grief does not subside but merely produces more and more tears, and, as
Patricia Berry observes in her essay on Demeter/Persephone, her tears do not
water the earth but only erode it.22
“Demeter” is what we might call the pattern of psychological behavior
that cannot make vertical connections between the material, concrete
“upperworld” and the metaphorical “underworld” of meaning. Her realm
is the wide world, not the underworld. Demeter moves only horizontally,
from this desperate activity or treatment to that, from one disappointment
to another. She is cut off from that realm where her hope—her offspring,
her renewed and renewable self—has been taken. “Without the vertical
sense,” says Berry, “Demeter cannot ‘stand beneath.’ She cannot move in
terms of depths or levels. Not only depth as ‘the unconscious,’ but depth
potential as a seed in each moment of life, its metaphorical implications below
its apparent sense.”24 Since the seed is always potential but never actual in
Demeter’s “world,” she remains trapped in that depressive mode that does
not change and believes change is not really possible—and, indeed, it is not
as long as she is stuck in a literal view of her experience and her idea of “cure”
is restoration, a return to the way things were.
The failure of the metaphorical sense, the wintry barrenness of the
imagination, is a hallmark of “depression.” It is felt as psychological paralysis.
One simply cannot move in the downward direction wherein lies, yet
unknown, the very thing one seeks. Instead, Demeter moves out. One of
the peculiarities of Demeter’s depression
is her tendency to seek refuge among man, the social world, the
city [as Homer describes in his “Hymn to Demeter”]. She doesn’t
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go off alone into the woods as might Artemis, or try to prove her
self-sufficiency as might Hera, or rush into a love affair as might
Aphrodite. Rather she breaks her connection with the Gods and
seeks refuge in the polis, the world of everyday events, “reality.”
Thus she may defend herself from the needs of her own
deepening with “reality excuses.” It becomes “impractical” to
tend to her soul. She has no time. It is not her business. She
must take care of the children and the household (which chances
are she is doing inadequately, with only the surface of herself,
anyway). Indeed then the needs of Demeter’s soul begin to cast
themselves in ways that actually are impractical and anti-social.
She perhaps expresses these needs in suicide attempts (literalizing
death as Hades), in religious conversion (portraying her need
for spirit), or by leaving her family, breaking her marriage, and
living out in desperation some fling or affair (in a displaced
enactment of her daughter Persephone).24
The human mothers who are identified with Demeter, and their
daughters, are of course “at risk” for Demeterian depression. For these
women, the therapeutic task involves gaining some distance from the all-
consuming grip of the Mother’s pain, that is, disidentifying with Demeter
in order to see just how powerfully she holds us, and what necessary
experience is portrayed in Persephone’s descent to Hades. It means moving
away from the overly-personal, exclusively horizontal perspective. It requires
a consent to loss so that one may understand the meaning of loss, and this can
be done only by moving more deeply into the suffering rather than
“naturally” (where Demeter would keep us) away from it. Put another way,
one must consciously sacrifice what has been taken away without consent.
The therapy of Demeterian depression lies in going deeper into the suffering
and truly following Persephone—not trying to bring Persephone back to the
upperworld. It means sacrificing the prejudice that loss means only loss and
that there can be no gain in it. This therapy of Demeterian depression is
possible through following the descent of Persephone, who, though initially
taken by violence, remains willingly in the Underworld and becomes, apart
from her status as wife of Hades, rightful Queen of that realm.
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On the Idea ofBeing “At Risk”
This business of being “at risk” is one of the secondary causes of

melancholy, according to Burton. Doctors and psychotherapists are always
telling us we are “at risk” for something, as if we aren’t smart enough to realize
that life is synonymous with danger. Who is not at risk for something from
anything? What is safe? Where is an edible fruit or vegetable that hasn’t been
mutated with carcinogenic pesticides? One wrong step in your own bathtub
can kill you. Corrosive toxins in the air will destroy this book even faster
than withering criticisms. One is more at risk at home than elsewhere, and
more in a car than on a plane, and there is more risk in eating meat than in
eating fish, and more risk in having breasts than in not, and after you pass
fifty years of age, getting out of bed in the morning is the riskiest thing you
can do, besides getting into it at night, because sleep is no protection against
heart failure.
One could conclude from this that in order to “reduce risk” one should
not live at home, drive a car, eat meat, be female, or be older than forty-
nine. Your insurance company decides which risks it will “protect” you from,
how much you and your protection are worth, and whether you yourself
are a “safe risk,” an oxymoronic way of thinking that is natural to small minds
that feed on statistics. There is, however, a small comfort in realizing that
you can buy yourself a decent funeral, which is permanent, for the price of
two year’s “comprehensive” medical insurance, which is not.
Even if you are “at risk for depression,” you may not “get it,” and there
are some worse things that could happen if you do. On the other hand, if
you are not “at risk,” there is no reason to think you won’t ever “get it,” and
a million reasons to expect that you will, particularly if you are intelligent,
sensitive, and realistic about life. This whole notion of speculating about
who is “at risk” and who isn’t is a risky business. The question of “heredity”
is muddied further, since disposition is itself merely a potentiality, not an
actuality: being “potentially” at risk—and all of us are—is quite a bit different
from being “actually” at risk—only some of us are. And then, even if there
is no known history of depression in your family, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t
there, nor does it mean it can’t get started with you. Somebody has to throw
the first bad gene into the pool.
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PART IV
PASSING THROUGH SATURN’S

RINGS
For if a man lives many years,

let him rejoice in them all;
but let him remember
that the days of darkness will be many
Stop haunting me now

Can’t shake you nohow
Just leave me alone
I’ve got those Monday blues
straight through Sunday blues
here we go again...
—“Good Morning Heartache,”

sung by Billie Holiday
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Coming Almost Full Circle

SCENE: St. Paul, Minnesota, 2003
ame Melancholy has spoken of herself, Robert Burton has spoken
D of his experience with and knowledge of her, and now I speak of

her. She has been my Muse since long before I knew what a muse
was, just as Saturn has been the unknown, unseen, but deeply felt heavy
presence throughout my life. But I am only one among countless melancholics
in whom the presence of Dame Melancholy and her mythic father, Saturn,
have profoundly influenced what we have thought, how we have felt, and what
we have done in life.
The present moment seems to me always a contradiction when I look
out my window at the impossibly white, untouched snow that has just fallen,
and the sun shining so brilliantly on it that even the chipmunks can’t seem to
tolerate the glare, and the field mice seeking refuge in alarming numbers in
the dark places of my house. How can such a splendid moment exist, given
humanity’s unforgivable past? The scene outside is very beautiful, very quiet.
I am tempted to optimism: a world this lovely cannot sustain deep shadows
for long. And yet, the more I gaze at this scene, the more my attention is drawn
in fact to just those shadows—the ones under the hedges, the pool of darkness
at the base of the tree, the intricate dark lines of branches and twigs. It is, after
all, these darkenings that do not permit the sun omnipresence, that give
contour, texture, pattern, depth, and hints of unknown life that lie buried
beneath the perfect snow. As Dame Melancholy informs so much of my psychic
disposition and inclination, so now I look at the scene with the blue-tinted
sunglasses she has given me, and I do not see a sanguine landscape. It is the
dimly lit that compels my interest, like the dark forms in black-and-white
documentary photographs and film noir movies of the 1940s.
She visits me as she must have visited Robert Burton centuries ago,
and countless others long before and always since. And I, too, as Burton must
have, most often wish she would not come, for I am still afraid of her and
yet unable to resist opening the door when she knocks. She seems to place
demands on me I cannot meet, to require more of me than I am; she is too
much like her father, the Swallower, to let me relax in the dark mood she
brings. While I love Keats’s Ode on Melancholy, because I too know those
melancholy fits that fall from heaven like an April shroud, I also know that
she is not always the great romantic figure of genius and greatness, but often
a shabby, irritable, petty, pessimistic attitude that gives me a strikingly
unpleasant psychological resemblance to Ebenezer Scrooge.
It is more than a little defeating to think how little a single person can
add to the story of Dame Melancholy and the ways she moves the soul. After
Shakespeare, Keats, Morrison, Tolstoy, all the poets and authors, what is there
to say? After Burton, James, Freud, Jung, Hillman, what more to analyze?
And after all the musicians, composers, and ill-fated young rock stars who
got drug-highs to escape the lows, what blues note hasn’t been played, what
hopeless lyric hasn’t been sung?
But the melancholic temperament is given to second glances, second
thoughts, as much from worried doubt as from love of lingering with an
idea .... So it might yet be worthwhile to retrace our steps, in keeping with
melancholy’s penchant for going back into history, into memory, and
retrieving some pieces and fragments left over from earlier parts of this book.
As we began with Dame Melancholy, moving out from the frame of Dtirer’s
engraving into the wider world of her life, so now it is time to pass back
through Saturn’s rings and return to her, still sitting, still waiting, as if there
really could be something new under the sun.
Circling Around in Rings
Melancholy folds in upon itself, endlessly involuted, its themes circling

back again and again. Ecclesiastes, whom I have quoted often, provided one
of those themes: generations come, generations go; there is nothing new under
the sun. This book could go on forever, and like the melancholy which is its
subject, would, in the end, have brought us to no new place. An old blue lady
in a raggedy dress, saying nothing of consequence any more, holding her rough
wisdom in a tight fist, giving us nothing.
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COMING ALMOST FULL CIRCLE
No point in going forward, then, but a few strands of ideas to be gathered

up before leaving. Each strand takes us through one of Saturn’s rings, breaking
through them while we stay in his orbit, circling for one final glimpse of his
vast, desolate surface. My bittersweet hope, like that of melancholics
everywhere, is that somewhere deep inside the cold heart of Saturn still sits
the Blue Lady, of difficult but noble character. Finding her would be nothing
new, but finding her—again and again and again—makes the trip through
those rings, filled with swirling debris, worth the effort.
First Ring: “Speaking” ofMelancholy
Just because “depression” is so “common,” we have developed little

sense of noting the matter of depression, so that we cannot be precise about
“what is the matter” and are unable to discriminate between all the possible
shades of melancholia: blacks, grays, somber violets, all the blues. Accustomed
to (and accosted by) loudness everywhere (music, news headlines,
advertisements), we often find it difficult to “hear” melancholia in a minor
key, to perceive how the smallness of a detail may signal something of
significance happening in the psyche. Melancholy does not usually come in
strong, pungent odors but in faint whiffs of memory, does not roar loudly
but whispers in the dark, does not strong-arm its way into daily life but sneaks
in through the back door of the mind.
The soul is sorrowful when she has no language of her own, when she
has to borrow from every other discipline, as has been the case since at least
the mid-nineteenth century, with the formation of the scientific profession
known as “psychology”. Hillman began this lament thirty years ago in his
masterwork, Re-visioning Psychology,1 and I think mainstream psychology’s
windows have become even more barren since then. Few clinicians seem to
either know or appreciate the etymological significance of the name of their
profession: psyche/logos is a Greek compound meaning “the speech of the
soul,” and “psychopathology” refers to “the meaning of suffering in the soul”
psyche/pathos/logos), and “psychotherapy” means “care of or attention to the
soul” psyche/therapeia). Hillman also gave us a well-founded and well-aimed
critique of both scientistic and humanistic psychology. And of course there
was Jung, who often stood alone as he tried to put psyche back into psychology
257
by introducing the arts and humanities and theology as legitimate and proper
(not to say, necessary) areas of study for the psychologist, along with the
scientific provinces of medicine, chemistry, and physics.
Like Echo of ancient myth, the soul can now be heard only faintly, as
if reduced to no more than whispered voice, no body—only the painful
longing of unrequited love for the lover of image, Narcissus. (And even that
desperate longing that caused her to waste away has been rendered ridiculous:
the one she yearns for has now been mutated into a “personality disorder”—
narcissism, with a small n.) And with no language, no power of autonomous
speech, how can she articulate herself but through symptoms, which few
can read? In conventional modern psychology, Psyche has become Echo,
doomed to repeat only the last words of others, and so her melancholy
deepens and her “body” wastes away with grief. Her last attempt to reach
her beloved Narcissus rebuffed, Psyche as Echo retreats,
spurned and hiding,

Ashamed, in the leafy forests, in lonely caverns.
But still her love clings to her and increases
and grows on suffering; she cannot sleep,
She frets and pines, becomes all gaunt and haggard.
Her body dries and shrivels till voice only
And bones remain, and then she is voice only
For all the bones are turned to stone. She hides in woods
And no one sees her now among the mountains,
But all may hear her, for her voice is living.2
For the most part, modern psychology is not interested in the

psychological resonances or echoes of words. It hears what is literally spoken,
but often misses the hidden metaphor, the nuance, the double or triple
meanings. Echo has indeed been reduced to mere repetition; her afterwords
are only, and merely, that, no longer carrying psychic implication, resonance,
subtle nuance, depth.
It seems to me that this deepening echo, or echo that completes

the word to itself, is much of what aesthetic, and certainly
psychological, understanding is all about. In psychotherapy it
is important to notice what echoes how. Some things echo empty
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(like a Pinter play), some things echo overfull (like a heavily

symbolic poem), some things echo flat then big (like
melodrama), and some things echo not at all—like jargon, say,
or interpretation. (“I have an inferior feeling function, a mother
complex, an Oedipal complex.” Well, so what?) Jargon and
explanation, because widely communicative and acceptable ...
bear little Echo.3
Americans have become painfully sloppy in the way they use language.
This is not because we are stupid, and certainly not because we have a variety
of colloquial speech rooted in ethnic and regional custom (e.g., Black English,
Cajun English, Appalachian vernacular). Psychology’s language has become
sloppy because it is used primarily as a conveyor of concepts rather than
images, and we have come to love the objects and concepts we talk about
more than the words themselves. But concepts are essentially dry things—
not sterile, not empty—but dry, devoid of the wet humors (blood, sweat,
tears, bile) that keep psyche from becoming an arid wasteland of objectivity.
The soul makes and responds to images because they are her mother tongue.
“Patriotism,” for example, is a noble concept, but it is the images of
patriotism—not its concept or logic—that generate emotional heat and rouse
to action: for Americans, it is the figure of the Statue of Liberty, the sound
of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” or the photograph of American soldiers raising
the flag at Iwo Jima.
Concepts are never as precise as images: they lack sensory details and
are by definition abstract and usually broad in scope. The concept of gravity,
for example, gives you no clue as to how it feels to be hit on the head by a
falling brick. It explains the falling but does not portray the feeling. In the
same way, the concept of “depression” as a disease is only one conception,
(and probably not the best), and is devoid of details that help us speak
precisely about what ails us. “Depression” as a concept does not have an
image, is not an image, does not help create images.
This is also why one of the hallmarks of depression is a relative paucity
of images. Psychology calls this a symptom and used to refer to it in an old
version of its diagnostic manual as “poverty of thought content,” meaning
that you are trapped in thinking obsessively about only one or two things: a
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preoccupation with money, perhaps, or sexual failure, or impending job loss,

or recent divorce, or whatever has come to occupy all the available thought
space in your mind. The refrain of the depressed person is invariably, “I can’t
imagine what I can do. I can’t imagine it will be better.” And here is the
crux of the depressed condition: one can’t imagine, there are no images. The
problem here is not one of conceptual thinking; it is a problem of
imagination. Imagination has failed. There seems to be no longer an ability
to imagine anything other, anything future, anything. Rather than referring
to depression as a problem ofcognition, correctable by changing one’s cognitive
“schemas, ” we ought to identify “depression” as a disturbance ofimagination, a
collapse ofthe imaginative faculty. The gods cannot speak to us when we do not
permit their images to reach us. What needs therapy, then, is not one’s cognitive
ability to think differently about depressing things, but the imagination, to
get it working again.
Images are spontaneous products of the psyche and are its native
language. You can talk about how despondent you are, and people who
understand the term “despondent” may understand something of how you
feel. But if you say you feel like the sound of a slow Spanish guitar or a sad
cello solo, you have spoken accurately in a universal language of the soul.
These mournful sounds are the sensuous images of the feeling we call
melancholy. The deeper the melancholy, the more sensitive one may be to
the sound. This is probably why the ancient Greek physicians recommended
music for the sorrowful soul—just music: not as dance therapy, not to do
aerobics to it, not for self-expression, not to use the music as a means but as
its own end, having all it needs to soothe the sad soul. You could say, for
example, “I feel depressed because I have abandonment issues that keep me
from raising my self-esteem and feeling secure.” Or you could sink into the
low, slow, plaintive sound of the old blues gospel song:
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,

A long way from home ....
Ask your heart which it prefers.
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Second Ring: “Culture” as “Cure”
We began this odyssey into melancholy guided by the figure of Dame

Melancholy, calling upon her as a Muse to lead us into the cavernous realm
of the god Saturn, the oppressive deity who devours his children. She
knows how to pass through the ring of Saturn that consists of boredom
and emptiness.
Melancholy is a form of soul-hunger. It wants filling. The depressive
way of filling oneself is through literal eating, and the connection between
“depression” and overeating or binge eating has long been established. But
just as melancholy is a deeper and more complicated psychological experience
than “depression,” the hunger is more complicated too, and requires more
than literal food to satisfy it: a rich diet of culture.
Esther Harding, one of the early matriarchs of Jungian psychology in
the 1930s and ’40s, suggested a “cure” for the kind of melancholy that
expresses itself in “sloth” and “restlessness.” The cure, said Harding, is a
capacity for concentration. “The capacity to direct and apply psychic energy
is one of the most important achievements of culture.”4 To push this a step
further, Harding’s idea suggests that culture itselfis at least a partial “cure”
for melancholy, for what we loosely call “depression,” perhaps even for the
despairing emptiness of acedie. This suggests further that we need a therapy
of the imagination, for it is the imagination that creates culture.
“Culture” comes from cult (Latin, cult[us], meaning “tilling, care,
refinement”), and includes the sense of the occult (from the same Latin root
meaning “hidden, secret, mysterious”). “Culture,” then, has to do with values
and mysteries that are invisible, hidden in the darkest blue of one’s
melancholy. It involves cultivating and refining forms of ritual enactment,
which embody complex sets of emotions for which there is no other equally
satisfying expression. On a grand scale, one thinks of a Roman Catholic High
Mass, or the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
But rituals are also made on a more personal level between lovers, close
friends, children, signifying a shared mystery of feeling and its history. The
rituals of love (Valentine’s Day chocolates and flowers, wedding rituals,
anniversary traditions), worship (liturgies, sacraments, the prescribed handling
of holy objects), family (holiday reunions, retold stories, untold secrets), school
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(proms, graduations, annual homecomings), even the dog’s daily walk (at a
special time, along this route, meeting that neighbor)—all these are enactments
of more than we can say. And it is just because we cannot say fully what these
mean that we must do them.
Culture also has to do with intense fermentation in heat, as the growing
of organisms in a culture-dish (which is also an alchemical vessel of
transformation). In the smallest of vessels, with the minutest and slowest of
movements, culture begins to grow from minimal ingredients. Great talents
sometimes sprout in the least expected places. It should not amaze us to find
child prodigies cultivating their gifts in what appears to be the barren soil
of neglect or poverty. But one does not need a towering intellect or immense
talent to make culture. One needs only a bit of appreciation for what appears,
either in one’s own imagination, or what is out there in the world’s
imagination. “Life is a cabaret, old chum, so come to the cabaret,” we were
reminded in the Broadway musical and the movie, and the cabaret serves
up a rich buffet, with something for every taste.
Culture means the absorption of “food” in the form of ideas and
images from the material world, the ground in which culture takes root.
One’s own melancholic self is a culture-dish, providing fertile ground for
absorbing images through music, film, literature, folk-songs, family stories
and history, whatever is available. This is the food for which one’s soul
hungers. When you feel stirrings of discontent or notice a lack of interest
in your own life, it’s time to put on a Bob Dylan record or read Dostoevsky,
or head for the nearest art museum or funky used book store, where one
finds a feast to whet the soul’s flagging appetite, and effective, inexpensive
therapy for the imagination.
Beauty, too, which is not merely dispensable window dressing but an
absolute necessity for the soul’s survival, can be found anywhere one looks
for it: all that is needed is the eye for it, the consciousness of it. The “seek-
and-you-shall-find” dictum applies here, as does “beauty is in the eye of the
beholder.” Not all the beautiful things that inspire us, encourage us, comfort
us are inside museums and concert halls and theaters. The beauty of a well-
made piece of furniture does for one person what the beauty of a racing
thoroughbred does for another. Both of these are expressions of culture, not
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only for the artist who makes the furniture or trains the horse, but for those
who see and delight in them as well. For some parents, the Mona Lisa simply
does not compare in magical beauty to their kindergarteners finger-paintings.
Others are deeply moved when they see the tragedy of King Lear. Some like
rap, some like opera, some dig New Orleans-style dixieland jazz.
The point is: eat what you like, but eat. We melancholics have to
appropriate the image of Saturn swallowing his children and begin to eat in
our turn, absorbing whatever kind of art the soul craves, taking in cultural
nutrients to enrich the anemic imagination.
Culture not only helps get one through the heaviness of melancholy, it
is actually brought forth from us in our extremity: perhaps melancholy forces
us to create culture as a desperate healing measure, the way a starving man
pushes himself beyond his strength to find food. Create or die. There is a
deep, mysterious affinity between real faith and profound desperation—both
can make something out of apparently nothing. It is hard to imagine
Beethoven composing the incomparable “Ode to Joy” in his youth, not
having gone deaf, not having endured lifelong misery. A “depressed”
Beethoven would have written nothing at all, a sanguine and happy
Beethoven would have written a nice but ordinary symphony. But the old,
deaf, melancholic, suffering Beethoven—he could hear in his head and feel
in his heart and write down on paper the passionate sound of joy out of
desperate need.
One does not have to be a Beethoven, a Shakespeare, or any kind of
artist. The making of culture is done not only by artists, but by all those
who partake of it. Shakespeare is nothing without an audience, the Rolling
Stones are nothing without their screaming fans, the greatest French chef
might as well be working at McDonald’s if she has no guests at her dinner
table. Culture moves in two directions at once: from the artist to the recipient,
and back again. While culture reaches into the deepest recesses of our psyche,
nourishing and regenerating and cultivating its desire for life, it opens us
up and draws us outward into life, enlarging us, validating hidden emotions
too painful to bear alone, connecting us to people and places beyond our
actual experience. Culture opens us up to what is there, helps us notice and
appreciate all the richness of the world. Culture gives us substance, a greater,
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more grounded sense of self. It can make the dry, dead air of deep melancholy
move again; it may stir up only a tiny breeze—but just enough to make a
single feather of the imagination tremble with possibility.
Third Ring: Renaissance in Blue
The idea of “poetic melancholy,” best exemplified by the Elizabethan

poets and rescued later by Keats and his Romantic colleagues, is independent
of the idea of melancholy as a condition of intellectual achievement, although
they have an affinity with each other. They are not mutually exclusive, but
rather two interpretations of melancholy: one as an intellectual force that is
the basis for the contemplative life or artistic production; the other as a
subjective emotional condition.
Renaissance humanism came to value the contemplative life for its own
sake, a shift in emphasis to subjectivity. In the earlier medieval period, the
contemplative life had as its purpose the establishment of a relationship with
God. The medieval contemplative belonged to God, but the Renaissance
contemplative belonged to himself. We might say that modern psychology,
insofar as it is concerned with the individual and his/her subjective world,
begins in the Renaissance. Reflection upon oneself becomes a vocation.
While the Italian Renaissance glorified the vita speculativa and hailed
melancholy as its intellectual foundation, the German Renaissance
emphasized the intimate connection between contemplation and a profound
awareness of suffering and life’s dangers. The spirit of Ecclesiastes is well
preserved in the northern version of Renaissance melancholy: a life of deep
contemplation is also a life of sorrow and grief and weariness; in Goethe’s
phrase, “the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”
This northern region is the home of Protestantism and thus also of William
James’s “radical pessimist.”
Renaissance humanism was “an awareness of freedom experienced with
a sense of tragedy.”5 In one sense, Hamlet is the epitome of the Renaissance
man, profoundly speculative (one might say, “morbidly introspective”—but
then, he had good reason), afflicted with chronic melancholy, son of a ghost.
His tragedy is played out because he listens to the spirit of the father.6 His
melancholy is not the earlier acedie of the medieval man, a loss of joy in God.
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COMING ALMOST FULL CLRCLE
His melancholy is a painfully heightened recognition of himself as subject in

his own story; he is Shakespeare’s Renaissance man.
Galileo moved the earth out of central place in the universe; Renaissance
humanism moved man into it. No dry, dusty theological despair for Hamlet.
His condition is “the new melancholy,” a subjective interiorization of world
grief and loss of innocence. He is, and knows himself to be, a dramatic figure
in the center of a dramatic “fiction”; and because subjective experience is
now as authoritative as theological doctrine and the external Word, suicide
becomes a viable solution to life. One’s fate is no longer entirely in the hands
of Fate. “To be or not to be” is a question possible only in a post-medieval
world. The melancholy that is informed by a benevolent, ghostly father is
not the dull gray of opaque “depression,” but the sharp-edged crystal blue
of interior sight.
While being swallowed into the mother is more similar to the

infantile unconsciousness, and perhaps to certain forms of quiet
stupor in psychiatric pathology, the second type, being swallowed
into the father, well describes the grief of the melancholic person.
This grief can also be seen as a kind of mania reversed,
introverted and inhibited, a terrible lucidity and awareness of
one’s own condition.7
What had formerly been entertained in theory—the attempt to find a

place in the world order for this connection between the melancholic
disposition and intellectual pre-eminence—Renaissance humanism now
discovered in individual experience. “Know thyself,” the ancient adage, which
had been eclipsed by the medieval dictum, “Know God,” returned in the
Renaissance spirit of antiquity.
It was the Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino who gave melancholy its
distinctive shape and its new Renaissance formulation, as the melancholy
“man of genius,” emphasizing both the beneficence of Saturn as his patron
father, and the subjective character of his melancholy. Ficino was a doctor,
also learned in theology and astrology, and was a translator of Plato and
Plotinus. He was himself a melancholic and a child of Saturn (his ascendant
planet). Between 1482 and 1489, in his forties, he wrote three books (De vita
triplici) on the symptoms and therapy of the melancholic, or saturnine, type
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of individual. Out of his own suffering and experience of Saturn’s malevolent

influence, Ficino found that the way out of his torment was to embrace it.
Saturn’s curse is also a source of redemption.
The highly gifted melancholic—who suffered under Saturn, in

so far as the latter tormented the body and the lower faculties
with grief, fear and depression—might save himself by the very
act of turning voluntarily towards that very same Saturn. The
melancholic should, in other words, apply himself of his own
accord to that activity which is the particular domain of the
sublime star of speculation, and which the planet promotes just
as powerfully as it hinders and harms the ordinary functions of
body and soul—that is to say, to creative contemplation, which
takes place in the “mens,” [mind] and only there. As enemy and
oppressor of all life in any way subject to the present world,
Saturn generates melancholy; but as the friend and protector of
a higher and purely intellectual existence he can also cure it. ...
Ultimately the Saturnine man can do nothing else—and
certainly nothing better—than embrace his fate, and resign
himself heart and soul to the will of his star . ...8
Ficino gives us a genuinely psychological understanding of melancholy.

It is his idea that one may become a child of Saturn by affinity as well as by
birth. The idea of affinity, or metaphorical likeness, makes it possible to
consider melancholy as a metaphorical condition of the self-reflective soul.
This shifts melancholy from a physiological base (the humors) and from a
metaphysical base (astrology, the Christian doctrine of sin) to a psychological
base: a disposition towards Saturn by likeness, or a kinship with Saturn though
fantasy. In other words, one may become melancholic by imagination, or
one may imagine one’s melancholy as a psychologicalfantasy.
Affinity may work by activity where disposition may work by biology.
For example, students are predisposed to melancholy and subject to Saturn
by their activity regardless of their humoral type or their astrological natal
sign. Ficino wrote:
Always remember that already by the inclinations and desires

of our mind and by the mere capacity of our “spiritus” we can
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come easily and rapidly under the influence of those stars which
denote these inclinations, desires and capacities; hence, by
withdrawal from earthly things, by leisure, solitude, constancy,
esoteric theology and philosophy, by superstition, magic,
agriculture, and grief, we come under the influence of Saturn.9
Turning to Saturn as the source of both wound and healing is an

expression of the alchemical idea, as well as the idea of homeopathic medicine,
that like cures like. And Ficino’s realization that the escape from Saturn’s
curse lies in embracing Saturn’s gifts brings together a number of threads
we have touched on. The weaving of a fabric of melancholy now includes:
von Franz’s idea that the cure for thepuer is work (including the Renaissance
appreciation of mental contemplation for its own sake); Hillman’s idea that
puer and senex are already one spirit and so may turn towards each other;
the Romantic idea of fate to be embraced and loved {amor fati); the Greek
idea of the melancholic as intellectually gifted; and the poetic sensibility of
inevitable death and grief inextricably mingled with beauty and art.
It is a long leap, not merely in chronological time but in psychological
significance, from humoral medicine to reflective imagination, or from the
spiritual despair of acedie to the soulful melancholy of romantic poetry. They
are not greatly different in symptoms, but they may be clearly distinguished
as experiences of the soul. It is an even longer leap from Keats’s lovely “Ode
on Melancholy” to the pinched conception of a contemporary “case” of
clinical major affective disorder called “depression.”
I found the following case in a newspaper column, one of those write-
in columns that offers help for various social and psychological problems.
The request for help read: “Since my mother’s death a year ago, my father
(age seventy-three) has been depressed. He mopes around the house and has
no interest in anything. I’m worried about him and think he needs
professional help. Can psychotherapy help him?”
And here is the gerontologist’s response:
Yes, provided that he is willing to participate. Psychotherapy is

frequently used as a treatment for depression for older people,
sometimes in combination with mild, anti-depressant
medication. Whether there is a need for medication as well as
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psychotherapy varies with patients. Your father probably would

be seen on a short-term, individual basis, with weekly
appointments for 10 to 20 weeks. The sessions initially focus on
reducing the symptoms of depression, then on helping your
father learn more about himself: his ways of coping with loss,
what he can do to improve his mood (increasing activities,
challenging negative thoughts), and how he can develop new
relationships so he becomes less lonely ....10
The gerontologist goes on to suggest a self-help support group, preventatives

for “another depression,” and follow-up “emotional checks.”
All I know of this unhappy man is what his daughter writes of him,
but every cell in my body fervently hopes that when I am seventy-three
years old I will be able to call my grief by its right name and have it
recognized as legitimate mourning, that I will be allowed to suffer it as the
fullness of my years deserves, and that I will have the courage and
encouragement to face my own imminent death. This kind of loss requires
more than “coping,” and failure to recognize that denies the dignity of the
lonely old man’s experience.
There is a certain offense, not to mention horror, in the gerontologist’s
response to the concerned daughter, in that while it is quick to point out that
therapy may indeed help and medication may indeed help and a support
group may indeed help, the melancholy of the father is nowhere acknowledged
as understandable and normal. Our foolish collective ideas about speedy
“recovery,” how it should happen, and what it should look like, may be only
adding to the widower’s grief. Is it not our own anxiety about loneliness and
loss and death that prevents us from allowing someone else to suffer these
things? What do we really know of the father/husband’s interior life, how he
understands his loss, what meaning he draws from it? Who are we to say?
The soul is best comforted when its wounds are dressed and addressed
in its own poetic language. Next to the newspaper article let me place a sonnet
by Keats, who faced his death at age twenty-six with all that he had, his art.
When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
268
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.11
Fourth Ring: Everything New is Old Again
An insight from Jungian analyst Murray Stein is that in the Ouranos-

Chronos/Saturn myth the fear of castration is not in the son (where Freud
placed it) but in the Father. The son fears, instead, repression and prison,
and thus becomes a free-spirited, usually rebellious, puer (“eternal youth”),
blind to the inherent complementarity he bears to the father, setting himself
up in opposition to him, ostensibly to save his own life.
But this, tragically enough, is one of the ways, possibly the most
significant way, in which hierarchical patriarchy is perpetuated, even by those
young men who are as damaged by it as women are. If they perceive only
the oppositions, they cannot see likenesses, and how much value they
unconsciously place on those likenesses. Thus, they become old men themselves,
even before chronology ages them, through unconscious identification. Like
father, like son, indeed. While protesting the abuses of power by the
patriarchy, for example, they nevertheless want it for themselves: they do not
want to dismantle patriarchal institutions; they want to take them over. While
protesting the tyrant, they serve his tyranny: for the old tyrant is eventually
replaced by a young tyrant. So one generation will burn its draft cards and
chant, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and they will be strong (and even right) in
their cause against the hollow appeal to patriotism (literally, “belief in the
father”) from the elders, and they will become the elders themselves and face
the same uprising from their sons. So the myth is enacted in each generation
of men. Not only Greek myth, but biblical wisdom points to the same
269
inevitability: “A generation goes, and a generation comes ... and there is

nothing new under the sun.”12
Chronos is paranoid that his son will do unto him what he, Chronos,
did unto his father, Ouranos—and so it happens. Paranoia is inevitable when
only one king is allowed to rule, only one view allowed to predominate. There
is a double problem here: one is the unrelenting masculinity of the old man,
the senex. The other is oneness, or the compulsion to unify, which means—
in this context—to dominate. Oneness makes for paranoia. When unity or
oneness or singularity of vision or purpose is the goal, one becomes a paranoid
tyrant in defense of it. Images and ideas of fragmentation, splitting,
separations, dissolutions, all become threats instead of alternate modes.
Chronos/Saturn must rule alone, or he cannot rule at all.
In the Greek myth, it is Zeus, son of Chronos, who overthrows his
father, and shows the same inclination to swallow or forestall any threats to
his rule from his own children. When Gaia and Ouranos (Zeus’
grandparents) warn him of danger from a future son, Zeus tricks his first
consort, Metis, who is pregnant by him, into entering his stomach. Then
he keeps her there, appropriates the unborn child Athene, and brings her
forth from his own head.
There is an important modification in the figure of Zeus as swallowing
father: Zeus, strictly speaking, does not devour his children after they are
born: rather, he limits his children, thus protecting, but limiting, his own
future. He ensures the status quo in a more subtle way than either Chronos
or Ouranos. Furthermore, Zeus fathers many children whom he does not
swallow at all. Stein comments: “Under Zeus, consciousness is flexible enough
to integrate all but the truly revolutionary ideas and forces.”13 There is
creativity within the framework of balanced order and harmony; the principle
of moderation, which Zeus embodies, is well served.
Under Zeus, Father of the gods, consciousness cannot tolerate the truly
revolutionary, the truly radical, the startlingly new. Whatever might radically
change or destroy the status quo, the established order, the ruling collective
value, cannot be allowed to emerge. In this sense, Zeus is like his father
Chronos, who was like his father Ouranos. Hold fast, hold, hold. Thus we
are told by the modern priests of Zeus (conservative politicians, HMO
270
magnates, CEOs everywhere, most therapists) that the solution to almost any
problem, including “depression,” is re-socialization or re-adjustment to things
as they are. “Depression” is sickness and the sickness is in you, right inside
your head—some foreign thing in your brain, some agent that is messing up
your thinking. The voice of “depression” is too weak to point out that the
sickness just might be in the Father and his priests.13 But then, Saturn is deaf,
and turns a deaf ear, or swallows up the protest.
But if you are melancholic, moderation is the wrong principle, and
this god and this framework are wrong. Nothing kills passion faster than
moderation. The passion, the suffering, should be directed to where one’s
melancholy is attracted: to the earth, Gaia, who has been hiding and
protecting the tiny, vulnerable life in the face of all of Saturn’s efforts to stamp
it out. It does not require a manic leap out of one’s depths, threatening the
ruling class or overthrowing the established order, to relieve one’s
“depression.” The melancholic attitude is not to draw sword and fight
dragons, but to pull oneself in, hide in a dark corner, and lick one’s wounds
until one is ready to face the world again.
And in attending to one’s wounds, with some sadness and eyes wide
open to the reality of one’s condition, one is perhaps able to see that the Father
is wounded too, alone and fearful on his precarious throne, weak and
ashamed. In this recognition of likeness, something turns ....
Fifth Ring: Not-Quite-Sharp Distinctions
All through this book, from one idea of melancholy to the next,
distinctions have been made between the soul’s melancholy and the mind’s
“depression.” We have been imagining melancholy as a natural, though
difficult and often painful, phenomenon of the human soul, one of the ways
it suffers and feels passion. “Depression” has been conceived as a modern,
more limited condition with somewhat different characteristics.
There are places where they can be sharply distinguished, others where
they blur together. As Elvis used to sing: “Moody Blue, can’t tell who I’m
talkin’ to. You’re like night and day, it’s hard to say, which one is you.” But
we’ll try. Here are a few brush strokes to repaint some differences:
271
Melancholia does not impair the imaginalfaculty. Depression does impair

the imaginal faculty, and is essentially a disturbance of the imagination: where
image was, there is now a void. (Anti-depressant drugs may alter brain
chemistry to help lighten mood, but they do not repair the imagination, and
this is why they are often effective at treating the effect but not the cause.) If
Jung was correct in his basic premise that “image is psyche,”14 then where
there is no image there is no psyche. This is why depression is experienced as
“loss ofsoul,” while melancholy brings to the soul a heavy sense ofloss.
Put another way, melancholy tends to make something of itself, or tries
to. As a mood, it attaches itself and gives a distinctive quality of feeling to
everything else: love, nature, thoughts of God, Grecian urns. Depression
merely darkens and constricts, goes nowhere, produces nothing. The blues
may be blue, suffering and mournful, but they sing of life. The dirge of
depression is a simple one-note chant of misery.
Melancholia is a temperament, not a category of clinical pathology,

not a “personality disorder,” not insanity, and only occasionally, in its most
extreme form, reaches the level of “madness.” Such a temperament, however,
for one who has it, may feel like all of the above at one time or another. But
this is more a function of the great depth of the soul’s disturbance than of
the mind’s inability to think in an orderly fashion. As a temperament,
melancholy is a way of experiencing the world and oneself in it, characterized
by a more-often-than-not pessimistic attitude, and a sorrowful or somber
view of life. But “temperament” is not to be literalized as a genetic inheritance
or biological condition, for anyone may acquire it through inclination and
experience, even if they are not predisposed to it at birth. You don’t have to
be born under the sign of Saturn to be one of his psychological children.
“Depression” is not a temperament but an affect, a misery-inducing
emotional slowing that may occur in anyone. Even the most sanguine people
are depressed on occasion, but unlike their temperamentally melancholic
counterparts, they are more likely to recall, and recall quickly, that life is
indeed a bowl of cherries and forget the pits, while the melancholic sees that
the cherries, though tasty, are flawed with pits from the outset.
272
COMING ALMOST FULL CLRCLE
Thoughts: too few, too many: “Depression” is a condition in which

there are too few thoughts, not enough to think about. The misery is in
the emptiness, an empty mind. Cognitive behavioral theory says depression
results from “faulty cognitive schemas,” that is, a wrong way of thinking
about yourself. But it is more likely that depression results from not
thinking enough, from not having enough thoughts about anything. One
or two thoughts, endlessly repeated, go nowhere, not even down. One
doesn’t drown in depression so much as one dies of mental thirst.
Melancholics have too many thoughts, a beehive in the mind, thoughts
that swarm around in no pattern that can be usefully apprehended, that sting
as often as they produce honey. The burden on the melancholic is to try to
make sense of all this activity, some of which may turn out to be actually
leading somewhere, to some new creative endeavor or change of attitude, if
one can only stay with it long enough.
Meaning and its absence: “Depression” brings a frustrating sense of

stoppage and a painful sense of meaninglessness. There is no point to one’s
suffering. Melancholy, conversely, tends to bring a sense of depth to one’s
being, and an overwhelming sense of meaningfulness. In depression there is
too little sense of meaning or purposefulness, in melancholia there is too
much; the one leaves one nothing to grasp, the other places too much beyond
one’s grasp. “Depression” leaves one with nothing to do, nothing to be;
melancholy assaults with too much to do, too much to become. Both leave
one with a powerful sense of failure.
Guilt and Shame: “Depression” brings guilt and self-blame, a nagging,

relentless litany of crimes and sins one has committed, the past trailing along
behind like a pack of plague-ridden rats. The sense of one’s “badness” and
moral failure, lack of achievement, weak will, and a truckload of “shoulds”
not only press down (de-press), but flatten.
The melancholic is more likely to be covered with—and wallow in—
shame, acutely sensitive to every area of inadequacy and insufficiency, unable
to ever be enough. And closely tied to the sense of shame (as Aidos) is a sad,
sometimes desperate, sense of longing, nostalgia, an attempt to recapture
273
innocence or simply return to some “place” before there was any need, any
need for shame, any longing at all.
Manic madness: “Depression,” like its counterpart “mania,” is to a large
extent a psychological defense against melancholy. Sitting stone-like in
depression, or rushing around in a frenzy, knocking off the hundred things
on the daily “to-do” list—both are ways of avoiding all the questions and
dilemmas and feelings that melancholy presents. Much safer to climb and
climb than to descend and possibly fall. The manic attitude (the heroic
attitude) defends against feeling the weight of loss, the darkness of sorrow,
the taste of mortality. It keeps us on the surface of life, which then becomes
boring, and boredom is merely the anteroom of depression.
Similarities, or overlapping, between melancholy and “depression” can

be seen in mood, both of which may be subdued or sad, and in symptoms:
slowness of thought and movement, insomnia, lessening or loss of appetite
(for everything), loss of ability to take pleasure in usually pleasurable things.
As Shakespeare phrased it, “With what I most enjoy contented least.”15
Contrasts: Put in sensate terms, some distinctions between melancholy

and “depression” might be:
274
Last Ring: The Place at Which We First Began
I began by scratching where it itches, and so, since the itch is still there,
this book must be counted a failure. After all, nothing has changed—has it?
Unable even to live up to T. S. Eliot's frequently quoted line, “to arrive where
we started / And know the place for the first time.” In this endless, bottomless
subject of melancholy, one could go on and on, circling, looking for some
new insight, some way through ....
The Blue Lady still sits, staring beyond the last page of this book. She
will never leave. But now, with Dr. Burton, it is time for me to make an
exit. And it is best, I think, to go with a different line from Eliot:
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark

come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.16
FINAL SCENE: Dr. Burtons House, late evening, January 24, 1640
(his last night)
t had been another long night of conversation with Dame Melancholy, who
I had been coming to visit more frequently than ever in the past two years.
While his mind was still sharp and resilient, Dr. Burton’s body bore the brunt
of his increasingly sorrowful soul. No amount of physicks prepared for him
by the apothecary could restore the vigor and anticipation of youth. He took
a little red wine in the morning after breaking his fast, something he had never
done before, but it lifted his spirits and he was sure it eased the creaking in
his joints. He slept longer and took an extra nap at noon.
Tonight he remained up considerably later than his usual bedtime,
owing to the late hour at which Dame Melancholy had come to call. She
appeared greatly aged. As he ushered her in, he wondered if this had happened
suddenly, or if he had failed to notice the change because he had seen her so
often in these last few years. He saw his own decline mirrored in her face,
and sighed deeply.
“As always, you are honored here as my guest, Lady, but I must tell
you, I have but little strength to be fully attentive tonight. The spirit is willing,
275
you know, but the flesh is weak, and I fear I shall have to retire to my bed
before long.”
“Yes, good friend, I know, and I shall take but little of your time. And
soon I shall have no need to come at all, nor you to receive me.”
Dr. Burton became mildly alarmed at this, sensing something ominous
in the air, as if a grief was hiding in the next room. “Do tell me what distresses
you. I can see your face is shadowed, your wings hang heavy and your eyes
have lost much of their light.”
So Dame Melancholy, whose voice had lost its once-mellow tone and
had fallen into barely more than a whisper, began to speak of all she had
carried in her heart for more eons than Dr. Burton could imagine, and
yet, the candles had scarcely burned halfway down before the Blue Lady
fell silent, her spirit exhausted. Looking at her sadly, Dr. Burton wondered
if acedie itself had dried up her words, all thought evaporated. It was as if
all the humors of her body had been burned away in the desert of despair.
For the first time in their long acquaintance, Dr. Burton felt the presence
of death in her.
So it was that the doctor did the only thing he could do for her: he
joined in her silence, and gently led her to the little dormer room he kept
for guests who, in time of need, might stay the night. She seemed oblivious
of his ministrations but merely allowed herself to be directed. It did not
surprise Dr. Burton that she had fallen deeply asleep even before he had
snuffed out the candle. He hoped, for her sake, her sleep would not be
troubled by either the demons of hell nor the hounds of heaven, but that
she would escape for a short time into the kind of peace known only to
the dead.
He sighed as he glanced at her one last time before going to his own
bed, knowing in his bones that he himself would find no such peace in the
brief space of night before the sun rose again and life began making its
demands on him as it did every morning.
But he rose with the sun unexpectedly refreshed, as if he had gone
so far into the abyss with Dame Melancholy that his waking to the bright
light felt like nothing short of a resurrection. He went quickly to his guest’s
room and tapped quietly. When she did not answer, he gently unlatched
276
the door and looked in. She was still in the deepest of sleep, her wings
limp as they lay completely inert, making soft hollows in the coverlet
of the bed. She had not moved all night. He reassured himself that she
was still breathing by watching her for several moments, but the
movement of her breath was so weak that he wondered if this sleep was
for her only an interim until Death came.
A tremor went through him, a realization that his refreshment was
temporary, merely a cruel prelude to a greater grief. It came to him, suddenly,
that she might not awaken at all. Though he knew she could not hear him,
he said softly, “Pray, do not go yet, Lady. I have need of you. And when you
go, it will be my turn soon after. And as he turned to leave, he recalled a line
from a play by William Shakespeare he had seen years ago on a rare trip to
London, about a melancholic prince of Denmark. “What dreams may come
when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?” He had understood Prince
Hamlet, for he himself had spent most of his life, in spite of his faith in
God, unable to decide whether to be or not to be. And now, with the Blue
Lady perhaps wishing not to be any longer, he felt a terrible surge of passion
to live, to live long, to live forever. He clasped his trembling hands protectively
over his heart, even though he knew now that it would be breaking for the
last time.
277
CODA (Blues style)
I’ve travelled and wandered almost everywhere

To get a little joy from life
Still I’ve gained but worries and despair
Still struggling in this world of strife
Oh me, oh my
Oh me, oh my
—“Worried Life Blues,”

sung by Bessie Smith
Notes
INTRODUCTION: “A MELANCHOLY OF MINE OWN ...”

1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is, with all the
Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes and Severall Cures ofit, edited
with an introduction by Holbrook Jackson, New York, Vintage Books,
1977, I, p. 22.
2. To imagine Dame Melancholy as a merely whimsical anthropomorphism
reduces her to lifeless concept instead of living person—an indignity she
has already suffered at the hands of modern psychology. In this book I
am imagining her as previous eras did, as a psychic person, a presence
in the soul, a figure—not figment—of the imagination. “Personifying”
signifies “the basic psychological activity—the spontaneous, experiencing,
envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic
presences....” (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York, Harper
and Row, 1975, p. 12.) Put another way, Dame Melancholy can be
imagined as a person of myth, and this requires that we bring a mythic
consciousness to understanding her. “The world and the Gods are dead
or alive according to the condition of our souls. A world view that
perceives a dead world or declares the Gods to be symbolic projections
derives from a perceiving subject who no longer experiences in a
personified way, who has lost his immagine del cuor [imagination of the
heart]. To rekindle this life, we start with soul, reimagining its internal
processes anthropomorphically. This leads to the ultimate conclusion that
we do not personify at all. Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in
the world that brings with it imaginal persons. They are a given with the
imagination and are its data. Where imagination reigns, personifying
happens. We experience it nightly, spontaneously, in dreams. Just as we
do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent
the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. The persons
NOTES
present themselves as existing prior to any efforts of ours to personify.

To mythic consciousness, the persons ofthe imagination are real. ” (Hillman,
pp. 16-17.)
3. Quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New
York, Vintage Books, 1990, Lectures VI and VII, p. 129. In his notes to
the text, Jaroslav Pelikan cites the source of the quote as Johann Petere
Eckermann, from Eckermann’s Gesprache mit Goethe (Conversations with
Goethe), 1836-48. The quote is dated 27 January 1824.
CHAPTER 1: MEETING THE BLUE LADY
1. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II. “Yond Cassius has
a mean and hungry look; / He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
/... He reads much; / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through
the deeds of men: ...”
2. John Milton, Il Penseroso, lines 11-16.
3. The wreath may also have a secondary signification as a palliative to the
affliction of melancholy. “Although, in the history of types, this wreath
is traceable to the adornment of 'homo literatus’ and therefore proclaims
Melencolia’s intellectual powers, nevertheless it must also be reckoned
as an antidote to melancholy, because it is made up of the leaves of two
plants which are both of a watery nature and therefore counteract the
earthy dryness of the melancholy temperament; these plants are water
parsley ... and the common watercress.” R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and
F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, London, Thos. Nelson and Sons Ltd.,
1964, p. 325.
4. Ibid., p. 323.
5. Ibid., p. 324.
6. Ludwig Bartning, Worte der Erinnerung an Adolf Bartning, Hamburg,
1929, quoted in Klibansky et al., op. cit., p. 321.
7. Robert Burton, The Anatomy ofMelancholy, ed. with introduction by
Holbrook Jackson, New York, Vintage Books, 1977, part II, p. 317.
8. Klibansky et al., op. cit., p. 320.
282
NOTES
CHAPTER 2: DAME MELANCHOLY’S FAMILY

1. C. Kerenyi, The Gods ofthe Greeks, London, Thames and Hudson, 1961,
p. 22-3.
2. John Keats, “Hyperion,” Book I, lines 1-4, 17-21.
3. Jan Ruysbroeck, The Mirror ofEternal Salvation, quoted in J. Huizinga,
The Waning of the Middle Ages, New York, Doubleday and Co., Inc.
(Anchor Books edition), 1954, p. 198.
CHAPTER 3: METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BLUE LADY
1. Edme-Pierre Beauchesne, De l’influence des affections de Гате dans les

maladies nerveuses des femmes (Paris, 1783). Michel Foucault, Madness
and Civilization: A History ofInsanity in the Age ofReason, translated by
Richard Howard, New York, Vintage Books, 1973, p. 219.
2. In Foucault, op. cit., p. 219.
3. Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York, Basic
Books, 1970, p. 243. Paraphrased from George M. Beard, A Practical
Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia), Its Symptoms, Nature,
Sequence, Treatment (New York, W. Wood, 1880). American Nervousness,
Its Causes and Consequences (New York, Putnam’s Sons, 1881).
4. Ellenberger, op. cit., p. 144, paraphrasing A. F. A. King, “Hysteria,” The
American Journal of Obstetrics, XXIV, No. 5 (May 1891), 513-532.
CHAPTER 4: HARD TIMES FOR MELANCHOLY

1. The “Red Queen” theory in paleontology hypothesizes that any species
in nature affects the species with which it interacts closely for a long time.
For example, a predatory carnivore must evolve improved methods of
detecting prey, since the prey becomes better adapted at avoiding
detection. Socially, this is known as “keeping up with the Joneses,” and
psychologically, it seems to appear in the form of ever-escalating levels
of activity required of individuals to keep pace with ever-escalating
demands: for labor, for emotional attention, for personal gain and self-
esteem, for availability. In short, the more we can do technologically,
the more we are expected and driven to do psychologically, in order to
283
NOTES
adapt to the context in which we live. So, like our counterparts of other
evolving species, we must keep running to stay in the same place, lest
we become “extinct.”
CHAPTER 5: OLD THEORY FOR A NEW AGE: THE HUMORS

1. R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and E Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, London,
Thos. Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1964, p. 13.
2. Philip Melanchthon, A Book on the Soul (1553), translated and edited
by Kim Thacker. The book is found in Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 13,
cols. 5-178, ed. by C. G. Bretschneider.
3. Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister, editors,Jung and Film: Post-Jungian
Takes on the Moving Image, London, Brunner-Routledge, 2001, p. 77.
4. As I have been putting forth melancholy as an antidote to mania, or as
a counterweight to excessive sanguinity, so melancholy may also be
considered as a moderating influence on a very one-sided choleric
temperament, which would be uncontrollably violent due to its being
chronically overheated. Every hothead needs to be cooled down, and
every lost temper needs to be found. One effective way of accomplishing
this is through a bout with the soft-colored, minor-key, sad ballad blues.
5. William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations ofImmortality from Recollections
ofEarly Childhood. This is the last line in the final sweetly melancholic
verse, which reads:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
CHAPTER 6: A PROBLEM OF AIR
1. From Nor Hall’s then-eight-year-old daughter, personal communication,

1982.
2. Murray Stein, “The Devouring Father,” in Fathers and Mothers, Zurich,
Spring Publications, 1973, p. 69.
284
NOTES
CHAPTER 7: ON THE TYRANNY OF BALANCE

1. See my essay, “Tracking the White Rabbit: Notes on Eccentricity,” in
Tracking the White Rabbit: A Subversive View ofModern Culture (London,
Brunner-Routledge, 2002), for a more developed discussion of
eccentricity as a way out of the fantasy of balance.
CHAPTER 8: GREATNESS, PASSION, MADNESS

1. Possibly the best thematic discussion of the full meaning of one’s “genius”
(daimon) is found in James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of
Character and Calling, New York, Random House, 1996. The daimon is
“a personified imaginal spirit who in Greek psychology was also your
personal fate. You carried your fate with you; it was your particular
accompanying genius.” (p. 257.)
2. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History ofInsanity in the
Age ofReason, translated by Richard Howard, New York, Vintage Books,
1973, p. xi. (Italics mine.)
3. C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, Collected Works, vol. 13, translated by
R. F. C. Hull, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1967, para. 54.
4. Peter Shaffer, Equus, London, Penguin Books, no date, Act Two, Scene 25.
5. Ibid., Act Two, Scene 35.
6. Toni Morrison, in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate,
New York, Continuum, 1984, pp. 128-9.
CHAPTER 9: BARREN WINDOWS: ACEDIE

1. Acedie, pronounced with a hard c, is the late Latin spelling of the fourth
of the Seven Deadly Sins. The word is also Greek, spelled akedia,
meaning “heedlessness,” “torpor.” The word is formed from ked- which
is the base of kedos, meaning “care.” A-kedia means, literally, without
care. It is an absence of caring, or an inability to care about anything.
2. Gertrud Kolmar, “Out of Darkness,” in Dark Soliloquy: The Selected
Poems of Gertrud Kolmar, (translated from the German by Henry A.
Smith), New York, The Seabury Press, 1975, p. 211.
285
NOTES
3. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 2 vols., (translated by

H. von E. Scott and С. C. Swinton Bland), New York, Harcourt,
Brace& Co., 1929, vol. 1, V, xii.
4. Ibid., vol. 2, VIII, lxi.
5. One of the best examples of the kind of legal wrangling that seems to
have happened often in the court of Heaven is the following story from
the monk Botho, cited in G. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion,
London, Cambridge University Press, 1923, vol. I, p. 507:
In St. Peter’s convent at Cologne there was a brother whose life

and manners were far apart from his monastic habit. For, dealing
loosely ... he had even a son ... and had given himself up in many
ways to worldly actions. This brother was seized with a sickness
... dying suddenly without confession or holy communion ....
Thereupon the fiend [the devil] seized his body and bare it to the
bars of hell. But St. Peter, whose monk the man was, saw this and
came to the merciful Lord, praying for his brother’s soul. Then
said the Lord: “Knowest thou not, Peter, how David by my
inspiration said, ‘Lord, who shall dwell in thy tabernacle, and who
shall rest upon thy holy hill?’ and, ‘He that leadeth an uncorrupt
life,”’, etc. At these words, St. Peter besought the holy angels, and
then every order of saints, to pray for this brother’s soul. But to
each, in turn, the Lord answered as before. At last he came to the
holy Mother of God, knowing that [her] prayers are soonest
heard. Wherefore, when the holy Mother of God rose to plead
with her Son, Christ arose forthwith to meet them, saying to his
holy Mother ...: “What askest thou of me, sweetest Mother ... ?”
When the holy Virgin had answered that she would fain plead for
that brother’s soul, then said the Saviour of the World: “Albeit
that I said through David that no man might dwell in my
tabernacle but he that leadeth an uncorrupt life; yet, since it is thy
good pleasure that he should have mercy, I grant that his soul may
return to the body in order that he may do penance for his ill
deeds, and may thus at last enjoy rest.” When the holy Mother
of God had told this to St. Peter, then St. Peter threatened the devil
with a great key which he held in his hand, and put him suddenly
to flight, and seized the soul of that brother which he held.
286
NOTES
Note also that Jesus’ act of redemption on the cross is not “evidence”
introduced on behalf of the poor monk; the emphasis is on human
obedience and living an “uncorrupt” life. With the burden falling
primarily on human shoulders to bring about entry into heaven, it is
not hard to see why so many failed and fell into acedie.
6. Eadmer, an English disciple of Anselm, from his Book on the Excellence
of the Virgin Mary, 4, quoted in H. Graef, Mary: A History ofDoctrine
and Devotion, vol. 1, London, Sheed & Ward, 1963, p. 216.
7. Caesarius, op. cit., vol. 1, IV, xxxviii.
8. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, translated by G. Ryan and H.
Ripperger, New York, Longmans, Green, & Co., 1941, p. 5.
9. Henry Adams, Mont St Michel and Chartres, New York, Doubleday
Anchor Books, no date, p. 290.
10. The “miracle stories” of the Virgin showing her as the greatest intercessor,
the mediatrix and redemptress, began to appear in Western Europe in
large numbers towards the end of the eleventh century, and were
widespread and popular until the end of the fifteenth century. The height
of cultic fervor was during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (It is of
interest to note that witch-hunting did not reach institutional
proportions until the Virgin cult began to decline.) The miracle stories
themselves were recorded by those literate enough to write, usually monks
and clerics, who heard them from colleagues, townspeople, and peasants.
Some recorders of these tales made compilations of all the known
miracles, of which the two most outstanding are Caesarius of
Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles and Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden
Legend. Other tales, and frequent repetitions (with slight changes) are
found in collections of exempla, sermons, and “manuals” for priests.
11. Fasciculus Morum, by a Franciscan author, ca. 1320; in A. G. Little,
Studies in English Franciscan History, 1917, p. 149.
12. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, New York, Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1954, p. 36.
13. Caesarius, op. cit., vol. 1, IV, xl.
14. R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, London,
287
NOTES
15. Ibid., p. 74.

16. Ibid., p. 79-80.
17. Ibid., p. 80.
18. Alexander Pope, Prologue to Mr. Addison’s Cato, l. 1.
19. Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and
Literature, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1967, p. 37.
20. Klibansky, op. cit., p. 67.
21. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, Q. 35, Art. 3.
22. Wenzel, op. cit., p. 49.
23. Ibid., p. 88.
24. Ibid.
25. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto III, l. 9.
CHAPTER 10: PESSIMISM AND RELIGIOUS MELANCHOLY

1. Andre Schwarz-Bart, The Last oftheJust, New York, Bantam Books, 1961,
p. 3.
2. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, pt. I.
3. William James, The Varieties ofReligious Experience, New York, Mentor
Books, 1960, Lecture VI, p. 112.
4. Ibid., p. 118.
5. Ibid., p. 117.
6. Ibid., p. 118.
7. Ibid., p. 120.
8. Ibid., p. 121.
9. Ibid., p. 124.
10. Ibid., p. 137-8.
11. Ibid., p. 133.
12. Leo Tolstoy, quoted in James, p. 130. James does not give the title of
the work.
13. James, op. cit., p. 133.
14. Ibid., p. 137.
15. Andre Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just, New York, Bantam Books,
1961, p. 5.
16 James Cabell, The Silver Stallion, 1926, ch. 26.
288
NOTES
17. Don Marquis, The Lives and. Times ofArchy and Mehitabel, New York,
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1935, p. 52.
CHAPTER 11: MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA
1. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation, New York, Penguin Books USA Inc.,
1990, p. 115.
2. Frances A. Yates, The Art ofMemory, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1974, p. 33. The reference to Aristotle is from the appendix, De
memoria et reminiscentia, to De Anima.
3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and
the Cosmos, translated by Daniel Russell, Boston, Beacon Press, 1971,
p. 119.
4. Ibid., p. 116.
5. Yates, op. cit., p. 67.
6. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I.
7. Bachelard, op. cit., p. 116.
8. C. S. Lewis connects “nostalgia” to shame and our lost sense of the
sacred: “In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country ... I feel
a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to
rip open the inconsolable secret in each of you—the secret which hurts
so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like
Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence ....” Quoted in Carl
Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1977,
p. 120.
CHAPTER 12: SHAME AND GUILT

1. William Shakespeare, Richard LIL, Act V, Scene III.
2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I.
3. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilsons New Calendar, ch. 2.
4. This was the original title of Adolf Giiggenbuhl-Craig’s book on
psychopathy (republished as The Empty Soul): Eros on Crutches:
Reflections on Amorality and Psychopathy, Dallas, Spring
Publications, 1980.
289
NOTES
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part 4, ch. 67, “The

Ugliest Man.”
6. Gerald Stern, “The Angel Poem,” in Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected
Poems, New York, Harper Collins, 1990.
7. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1955, lines 88-94.
8. Exodus 19:18-20 (Revised Standard Version).
9. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York, Harper & Row, 1975,
p. 83.
10. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 1994, p. 94.
11. Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, op. cit., p. 186-9.
12. King Lear, Act III, Scene 2.
13. Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos, translated by Ralph Manheim, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 359, n. 237.
CHAPTER 13: ROBERT BURTON AND HIS DETAILS

1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy ofMelancholy, edited with an introduction
by Holbrook Jackson, New York, Vintage Books, 1977, I, p. 207.
2. Burton, op. cit., I, p. 210.
3. Ibid., p. 207.
4. The idea of having the “wrong fantasy” of family is from James Hillman
in his Myths ofthe Family, Audio-Cassette, February, 1997.
5. Burton, op. cit., Part 1, Sec. 1, p. 172.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 235.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 239.
11. Quoted in Tillie Olsen, Silences, New York, Delacorte Press, 1978,
p. 164.
12. Burton, op. cit., Part I, Sec. 2, p. 242.
13. Ibid., p. 246.
14. Ibid., p. 249.
290
NOTES
15. Ibid., p. 253.

16. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I.
18. Ibid., p. 283.
19. Ibid., p. 274.
20. Franz Kafka, I Am A Memory Come Alive (Autobiographical Writings),
edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, New York, Schocken Books, 1974, p. 88.
22. Patricia Berry, “Neurosis and the Rape of Demeter/Persephone,” in Echo’s
Subtle Body, Dallas, Spring Publications, 1982, p. 23.
23. Ibid., p. 26.
24. Ibid., p. 23.
CHAPTER 14: COMING ALMOST FULL CIRCLE

1. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York, Harper & Row, 1975.
2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, lines 391-400.
3. Patricia Berry, “Echo’s Passion,” in Echo’s Subtle Body, Dallas, Spring
Publications, 1982, p. 120.
4. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy: Its Source and Transformation, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 48-9.
5. R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, London,
6. Patricia Berry, “Hamlet’s Poisoned Ear,” in Echo’s Subtle Body, Dallas,
Spring Publications, 1982, is an original and absorbing essay on Hamlet
and the ghostly presence of the father.
7. Augusto Vitale, “Saturn: The Transformation of the Father,” in Fathers
and Mothers, Zurich, Spring Publications, 1973, p. 30.
8. Klibansky, op. cit., p. 271.
9. Marsilio Ficino, De vita triplici III, 2, in Klibansky, op. cit., p. 261.
10. Minneapolis Star Tribune, Sunday, 29 July, 1984.
11. John Keats, Sonnet VII.
12. Ecclesiastes 1:4, 9 (Revised Standard Version).
13. Murray Stein, “The Devouring Father,” in Fathers and Mothers, Zurich,
291
NOTES
Spring Publications, 1973, p. 73.

14. C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, vol. 13 of Collected Works, translated by
R. F. C. Hull, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967, para. 75.
15. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 39.
16. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: East Coker, II.
292
Index
A popular understanding of 143

thought to be overcome by
acedie 34, 132 changing behavior 145
and Dame Melancholy 4—5 treatment of, in modern times
Aquinas's view of 143 145
as a condition of dryness of soul trivializing of 144
143 Adam 141, 142, 193, 194, 196,
as a sin directed against God 143 197, 199, 204
as a state of boredom 143 addiction 71, 84
as a vice 140, 143 adolescence 88
as aversion to soul 146 adultery 239
as bodily vice 144 Agave 209
as loss of Eros 149 aging 66, 159, 181, 221, 225, 226,
as melancholy pushed to the brink 227, 228
of suicide 137-138 as a drying out of memory 226
as neglect of spiritual duties 144 as a drying process 226
as result of lapse of consciousness as bringing increased tendency
143 towards melancholy 224
bred by monasticism 138 dryness resulting from, associated
contrasted with mild melancholy with wisdom 227-228
223 agitated depression 87, 160
differentiated from sorrow, etc. agitation 47, 48, 84, 87, 89, 90
143 Aides 189, 190, 191, 193, 198, 206,
externalization of 143 207, 210, 211, 212, 273
in analysts and psychotherapists Ajax 119
146-148 Albertus Magnus 178
linked with melancholic nostalgia alchemy 67, 78, 83, 95, 110, 227,
181 241, 267
not to be confused with burn-out amor fad 126,210,267
146 anal-retentive personality 238
Pope Innocent Ill's view of 142—
143
INDEX
anger balance
as temporary madness 244 as causing life to stop 109
as the cause of constipation 81 fantasy of 108-109
blackness associated with 97 Ball, Harvey 157
relationship of, to bile 81 bat (animal) 24
righteous 190, 191, 207 Beard, George 51-53
turned inward, as depression 81 Beethoven, Ludwig van 8, 263
women more prone to 244 behaviorism 143, 145, 245
anima possession 48 Bellerophon 119
Anna O. 54 Bernhardt, Sarah 178
anti-depressants 7, 59, 72, 86, 140, Berry, Patricia 84, 248, 250
267, 272 Binet, Alfred 55
anti-intellectualism 120 bipolar disorder 58, 70 See also
anxiety 49, 70, 83, 98, 164, 174, manic depression
209, 268 black bile 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82,
anxiety neurosis See neurosis: anxiety 83, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 119,
neurosis 141, 176, 178, 221, 224, 227, 241
apathy 99, 149 blackness 80, 97, 99, 101, 133,
Aphrodite 101, 148, 149, 150, 190, 141, 159, 237
193, 206, 239, 249 bladder 100, 221
Apollo 209 blood 31, 40, 53, 76, 77, 78, 79,
Aquinas, Thomas 143, 144, 146 80, 83, 84, 90, 162, 177, 226,
Archy the Cockroach 169-170 227, 237, 259
Aristotle 8, 23, 51, 83, 119, 133, blood-soul 97
173, 240 blues (music) 35, 63, 67, 150, 240,
Armstrong, Louis 67 243, 256, 260, 272
arrogance 64, 109, 200 Bonaventura, St. 25
astrology 220, 221, 265, 266 Boone, Pat 84
Augustine 133 boredom
Austen, Jane 9 acedie as a state of 143
autumn 78, 92, 226 as one of the rings of Saturn 261
avarice 21, 22 as the anteroom of depression 274
as the cause of nervous symptoms
В 49
as the result of balance 109
Bachelard, Gaston 175, 176, 178
as the result of moderation 107-
“bad air” (Robert Burton) 99, 241
108
294
INDEX
as the result of regularity of habits as "liege lord" 134

106 medieval view of, as stern and
of the French aristocracy 49 uncompromising 136
brain 6, 7, 64, 66, 67, 79, 97, 121, the role of, as Judge 135-137
139, 178, 233, 239, 242, 243, Christian humanism See humanism:
246, 271, 272 Christian
Breuer, Joseph 54 Christianity
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 8 as seeking to bring body in
burn-out 146, 147 submission to mind 144
Burton, Robert 4, 25, 99, 100, 144, as the lens through which we see
160, 220-222, 225, 227, 228, melancholy 163
231-233, 235-246, 250, 256 humanistic 133
as melancholic and misogynist medieval 35, 132, 135
234 the beginnings of 202
background 6-7 Chronos 33, 34, 55, 89, 101, 126,
importance of his work 6-7 221, 225, 269, 270 See also
not prejudiced by the medical Kronos
model of melancholy 7 Chrysostom, St. John 138-140
Church Fathers 133, 135
c Churchill, Winston 8, 235
Clinton, Bill 191
Cabell, James 166
Cartesian dualism 121 co-dependency 71, 102
castration comedians 47, 82
Como, Perry 84
fear of 269
complexion
theory 55
"black" 232
celibacy 239, 240
dark 77, 78
Chaplin, Charlie 47, 82, 223
jaundiced 78
character 6, 10, 21, 22, 77, 80, 83,
pale 79
110, 111, 119, 132, 137, 146,
ruddy or reddish 78
202, 206, 220, 223, 224, 229
sanguine 232
child archetype 65
complexes
choleric temperament 89, 232
as basis of character and pathology
choleric-melancholic See
110
melancholics: choleric
guilt complex 205
Christ See also Jesus
mother complex 85, 259
as being swayed by his Mother's
Oedipal complex 259
intercession 136
295
INDEX
passed on from generation to contemplation 1, 18, 23, 25, 140,

generation 229 234, 264, 266, 267
theory of 55 covetousness 244
confusion 10, 19, 89, 109, 110, 178 creativity 64, 121, 175, 178, 197,
consciousness 270
acedie as lapse of 143 culture 3, 5, 7, 8, 64, 65, 67, 70,
and memory 226 83, 86, 88, 89, 152, 161, 164,
and the process of redemption 165, 166, 167, 174, 189, 205,
161 234, 235, 241, 246, 248, 261,
and the "work against nature" 262, 263
110-111 as a healing measure 263
as being know by an other 197 as regenerating psyche's desire for
as being put to the Question 199 life 263
as making one weary of life 245 cure
as resisting radical change, under as restoration, in Demeter's world
Zeus 270 248
darkening (blackening) of 83, 86, for acedie 138
96 for melancholy
differentiated, needed for guilt brought about by Saturn 266
204 culture as 261
division of, (Alfred Binet) 55 not a major focus 3, 10
flexibility of, under Zeus 270 not brought about by rainbow
meaning of 196 26
of beauty 262 occupational therapy as 242
of evil 157 work as 267
saturnine, of Ecclesiastes (the for neurosis, hypnosis as 54
writer) 167 for religious melancholy, none
Saturn’s 224 163
self-consciousness and shame 196 for "sick souls", irrelevant 169
synonymous with "shame” in not desirable 122
Genesis 194-195, 204 vs. search for meaning 71
tired 147
without shame, as dangerous 211 D
constipation 8, 68, 71, 99, 100,
Dali, Salvador 178
221, 237, 238
Dante 25, 147
constriction 24-25, 37, 98, 99, 101,
Darwin, Charles 51
165, 238, 241, 272
deafness 19, 40, 41, 221, 263, 271
296
INDEX
death 22, 23, 33, 34, 35, 39, 63, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
101, 139, 150, 153, 159, 160, (DSM-IV) 5, 57, 68, 69, 164,
161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 259
174, 179, 180, 189, 201, 224, Dickinson, Emily 146, 173
234, 239, 249, 267, 268, 276, Dionysus 162, 209
277 disgust 143, 147
Demeter 247—249 dotage 137, 165, 227, 228, 242
Demeterian depression See depres doubt 9, 20, 25, 92, 132, 221, 246,
sion: Demeterian 256
depression dryness
as a psychological defense against combined with heat in choleric
melancholy 274 melancholy 178
as anger turned inward 81 Heraclitus on 228
as caused by ego's failure 145-146 in neurasthenia 52
as over-used and undervalued 70 of black bile 83, 176, 178
boredom as anteroom of 274 of brain, caused by lack of sufficient
characterized by weakness 59 sleep 242
contrasted with melancholy 220 of choleric temperament 78
de-melancholized 245 of concepts 259
Demeterian 249 of imagination, resulting from
divorced from historical and melancholia adusta 85
religious contexts 65—66 of male mode of melancholy 101
genetic theory of 246-247 of melancholic temperament 78
high incidence of, in mother of melancholy
daughter pairs 247 counteracted by a sense of
in the DSM 68-69 humor 81
lack of precision a symptom of 220 counteracted by culture 264
on being at risk for 250 leading to despair 101
paucity of images, a hallmark of of memory, resulting from aging
259-260 226
Deschamps, Eustache 137 of Saturn's masculinity 41
Desert Fathers 138 of spiritual austerity (asceticism)
despair 4, 8, 19, 21, 32, 34, 37, 39, 102
50, 87, 98, 101, 120, 131, 132, of stone, congesting
138, 144-151, 153, 157, 164, Michelangelo's body 85
173, 180, 181, 203, 261, 265, of theological despair 265
267, 276, 279 of wind of despair 131
297
INDEX
resulting from absence of Eros 98 193, 206, 240

resulting from acedie 143-144, Eve 55, 193, 194, 197
147 exercise 40, 50, 52, 66, 108, 236, 242
resulting from aging 225-229
resulting from melancholia adusta F
85-86 false-memory syndrome 173
resulting from too much sex 240 family 34, 51, 99, 161, 164, 180,
dual personality, theory of 54-56
229, 230, 231, 246, 261, 262
Duke Ellington 146, 150
fantasy of 230-231
Diirer, Albrecht 4, 17, 18, 21, 23, origin of the word 231
24, 26, 174, 176, 179, 199, family of origin 229-230, 231
256 Fate 9, 20, 21, 88, 113, 125, 130,
E 178, 180, 190, 221, 229, 265
Ficino, Marsilio 24, 223, 265-267
Eadmer 136 financial model of energy 52
Ecclesiastes 37, 92, 121, 144, 256, flightiness 236, 242
264 flying 24-25, 59, 70-71,130, 167, 198,
Ecclesiastes, Book of 35, 167 199, 200-201, 208, 212, 242
Echo 258,259 fornication 239
Eden, Garden of 37, 55, 109, 142, Foucault, Michel 122
180, 193, 204, 211 frenzy
effemination 53 and epilepsy 119
ego 57, 70, 71, 120, 145, 146, 167, as punishment from the gods 119
205, 207, 209, 210, 228, 234, associated with lungs, by ancient
243 Greeks 98
-state 245 associated with mania 97, 274
discomfort 245 associated with melancholia 119
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 8 caused by lack of sufficient sleep 242
Eliot, T. S. 275 creative 120
Elvis Presley 39, 41, 84, 271 induced by music 41
emptiness 261, 273 not co-existing with reason, in
Enlightenment, the Age of 46, 48, Cartesian dualism 121
119, 122, 132, 166 Plato's view of 119
enthusiasmos 119, 122 Freud, Sigmund 54, 55, 137, 238,
envy 59, 242, 244 256, 269
Equus (the play) 122-123
Eros 25, 90, 98, 147, 148-150, 190,
298
INDEX
G as the means by which the gods

reach us 209
Gaia 33, 101, 270, 271 articulate nature of 205
Galen 237, 240 brought on by depression 273
Garden of Eden See Eden, Garden of contrasted with shame 204-209,
Gardner, Howard 121 210
gaudiam (joy) 143 Hillman on 207
gender distinctions objective nature of 204
in describing melancholy 46—56 pathological 208
in nervous disorders shame as antidote to 210
not present among the poor 50
genius 19, 21, 25, 71, 91, 112, 118, H
119, 120-121, 123, 124, 126,
142, 170, 177, 223, 233, 256, Hades 247-249
265 Hamlet (Prince of Denmark) 264—
Gish, Lillian 47 265, 277
Goethe 9, 264 Harding, Esther 261
Golden Age 33, 180, 189, 205 headache 48, 51, 63, 96, 239
Goya, Francisco de 36 health
Great Depression 39, 82, 183 absolute, an unattainable ideal to
greatness 8, 71, 96, 108, 118, 119, the ancients 109
121, 124, 178, 188, 234, 245, as an abstraction 111
256 as ephemeral 159
Gregory, St. 25, 118 as not merely return to status quo
grief 4, 8, 19, 21, 81, 91, 97, 98, 161
149, 150, 163, 176, 183, 189, associated with speed 65
190, 193, 195, 231, 240, 244, of soul, memory vital to 68
245, 247, 248, 258, 264, 265, one-sided view of, in modern times
266, 267, 268, 276, 277 70-71
Griffith, D. W. 47 our ideas of mental, informed by
Giiggenbuhl-Craig, Adolf 192 Saturn 164
guilt progression from sickness to, not
and heroism 209 linear 111
as becoming destructive when psychic
taken literally 207 no place for negative thoughts
as not existing without law 205-206 in modern view of 71
as reminding us of our obligations satisfaction of female sexuality
209 important to 239
299
INDEX
seen as synonymous with balance 108 Melancthon on 83

shame as bad for 191 of Aides 207
strength as modern criterion for of choleric melancholics, help fuel
59 culture 89
symptoms of mania of drying 226
now equated with signs of 71 of passion, modern culture afraid
now the criteria for 57 of 83-84
to be judged by quality not reduced, causing conditions
quantity of humors 79 associated with phlegm 79
women's, novels as harmful to 48 sexual, Dionysus as god of 162
heart 77, 92, 98, 149, 163, 166, heaven 26, 133, 134, 135, 137,
179, 193, 210, 233, 239, 257 163, 180, 188, 198, 212, 256,
heat 276
and black bile 83 Hell 19, 25, 35, 36, 112, 132, 133,
and culture 262 135, 140, 142, 147, 163, 198,
and guilt 206 211, 212, 219, 276
and images 259 hellebore 68
and old age 227 Hera 249
antidotes to 84 Heraclitus 21, 113, 228
Aristotle on 83 Hercules 119, 120
as agent of transformation in hero, manic 58,211
alchemy/humor theory 83 heroism 58, 119, 150, 208
as part of humoral theory system 77 Hesiod 33, 190, 211
as the cause of melancholia adusta Hildegard of Bingen, St. 141, 142, 158
85 Hillel, Rabbi 199
effect of, on choleric temperament Hillman, James 4,207,209,210,
231 256, 257, 267
effect of, on yellow bile and blood Hippocrates 73, 229, 244
83 history
in choleric melancholia 88 Americans as having antipathy to
in creative work 89 174
in the mind, generated by obses as a graveyard 174
sive thinking 84-85 associated with darkening and
in the psyche, now seen as drying out 225
psychopathology 84 sense of, being recovered in
in the sanguine melancholic 90 memoirs 174
lacking in the phlegmatic melancholic histrionic personality disorder 47,
87 236
300
INDEX
Holiday, Billie 8, 150 Hurt, John 195

Holocaust 152, 203 hypnosis 54
Homer 97, 248 hypochondriasis 40, 46-50, 52, 54
homosexuality 124, 229, 239 hysteria 47, 54, 55, 56, 235, 236
hope 3, 20, 25-26, 31, 35, 67, 78, as form in which women experi
85, 91, 130, 132, 147, 148, ence melancholia 236
149, 163, 164, 190, 240, 248, hysterical neurosis See neurosis:
256, 257 hysterical neurosis
human condition 19, 67, 82, 126,
142, 161, 192, 194, 200, 210 I
humanism 134
Icarus 200-201
Christian 35, 57, 71
idleness 143, 144, 242
Renaissance 264, 265
imagination
secular 133
aged 229
humility 140, 200
air as the element of 99, 241
humor, sense of 81-82
and culture 262
humoral syndromes 85
and family 231
humoral temperaments
and memory, in Aristotle 173
choleric 78
anemic, enriched by culture 263
melancholic 78
as being in need of therapy 260
phlegmatic 79
as pulling melancholics down 178
sanguine 77-78
as stirred by culture 264
humoral theory See humors: theory of
as the cause of melancholy 244
humors
as the means of becoming melan
and the life-cycle 91, 224
cholic 266
and the seasons 91-92
barrenness of, as hallmark of
cold 79
depression 248
four
disordered, Burton on 244
also known as complexions 77
disturbance of, as depression 272
combination of, determined by
disturbed or "corrupt" 91
heredity and stars 77
drying up of 85
governing human behavior 77
effect of aging on 228
theory of 17, 52, 81, 83, 97, 143,
failure of, in depression 260
157, 176, 220, 222, 224, 229,
impoverished 91, 241
231, 234
in pathological melancholy 160
as antidote to fantasy of balance
in the modern world 65
109
not repaired by anti-depressants 272
as metaphor 76-77
301
INDEX
obliterated by melancholia 99 irony 6, 58, 67, 69, 71, 81

people with minimal, prone to irritability 3, 48, 49, 57, 58, 71, 78,
melancholia 233 81, 85, 91, 105, 135, 177, 182,
sexual 226 243
Shakespeare on 177
therapy for, to be found in culture J
262
Jackson, Holbrook 6
therapy of 261
James, Alice 8
vehemence of, in melancholics
James, William 8, 23, 133, 142,
177
157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162,
weakness of, the chief cause of
169, 179, 189, 245, 256, 264
melancholy 228
Janet, Pierre 52
impotence
jargon 120, 162, 259
intellectual 233
jazz 84, 146, 263
psychological 41
Jeremiah, the prophet 8
sexual 52, 221
Jesus 20, 126, 135, 136, 164, 202,
individuation, theory of 110
203 See also Christ
indolence 21, 144
John Chrysostom See Chrysostom,
Industrial Revolution 50
St. John
inertia 86, 102
Johnson, James 50-51
inheritance 77, 221, 229, 246, 272
Jung, C. G. 48, 55, 91, 110, 122,
of character, Hippocrates on 229
147, 173, 222, 224, 256, 257,
of depression in mother-daughter
272
pairs 248-249
Jupiter (planet) 223
innocence 36, 159, 180, 200, 211,
justice 133,137,200,205,211,
237, 274
244, 245
Innocent III, Pope 142
Inquisition 200, 231 К
insomnia 8, 24, 160, 243, 274
introspection Kafka. Franz 245
as characteristic of Renaissance Keaton, Buster 47
man (Hamlet) 264 Keats, John 26, 34, 35, 176, 256,
embodied in the melancholic 264, 267, 268
temperament 5 Kerenyi, Carl 211
Saturn as the god of 223 King, A. F. A. 55-56
introversion 71, 226, 233 King Lear (character) 75, 76
considered pathological in King Lear (play) 75, 263
American culture 233
302
INDEX
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 53 of appetite 160, 274

Kronos 33, 100 See also Chronos of capacity for pleasure 274
as the tortuous thinker 33 of Eros 149
of innocence 19,265
L of joy in God 264
language 17, 76, 98, 120, 122, 219, of love 70,206,240
224, 257, 258, 259, 260, 268 of meaning 161
of the soul, images as 260 of "seed" (sperm) 240
sloppiness in the use of 259 of shame 211
laughter 38, 81, 82, 107 of soul, depression experienced as
law 272
as forcing psychological differentia of the past 179
tion 205-206 of values in process of redemption
as highest value in our civil and 161
religious tradit 205 possibility of finding gain in 249
Lawrence, T. E. (of Arabia) 178 Psyche's, of Eros 150
laziness 4, 21, 140, 144, 145, 168 realization of 149
Lee, Peggy 84 sense of 146, 189, 272
lethargy 19, 80, 99, 105, 247 understanding the meaning of
Libra 223 249, 268
Lincoln, Abraham 8, 78, 226, 227, weight of 101,274
love
235
liver 78,97,231,233 unrequited 71, 180, 258
Lloyd, Harold 47 lunacy 224 See also madness
loneliness 4, 34, 45, 67, 89, 90, lungs 96, 97, 98, 99
100, 126, 182, 224, 268 lust
Lopez-Pedraza, Rafael 238 for life 78
loss 58, 169, 179, 247, 268 sexual 86, 87, 90, 168, 177, 239
as a magical preservative 171 Luther, Martin 8, 68
as the inspiration for blues music M
67
consent to 249 madness 23, 37, 56, 63, 102, 119,
"coping" with 268 120, 122, 123, 124, 135, 140,
Demeter's, of Persephone 247 141, 162, 163, 177, 209, 224,
object, grief more than 19 244, 272, 274
of "animal toughness" (William mania 5, 7, 56, 57, 58, 59, 65, 70,
James) 159 71, 80, 87, 97, 98, 265, 274
303
INDEX
of society, directly proportional to "sick souls" looking for, in pain and

depression 65 suffering 169
symptoms of 57-58 vs. cause 221
manic-depression 58, 70, 97, 111, meat
112 See also bipolar disorder as toxic to melancholics 237
Marquis, Don 169-170 medical model of melancholia 5-6,
Mars (planet) 223, 224 7, 63-64, 69-71, 122
masochism 53, 144 meditation 18, 19, 25
masturbation 53, 239 melancholia See also melancholy
meaning 150 and alchemy 67
and old age 228 and blues music 67
and psychotherapy 229 as a tradition among statesmen
and shame 200, 212 235
as metaphorical "underworld" 248 as afflicting introverts 234
failure of 180 as affliction given by the gods 8
in depression and melancholia as corresponding to nigredo stage
273 in alchemy 78
in suffering and grief for melan as mental illness 80
cholic 163 as psychic suffocation 98
in the pain of nostalgia, difficult to as result of Adam's disobedience
find 180 142
lack of as true psychosomatic condition
in one's work 22 80
in soul's suffering 72 associated with greatness 8, 121,
in the absence of Eros 147 188, 234
melancholics struggling to find, in associated with passion 177
history 174 associated with spiritual frenzy
melancholy as having the dignity 119
of, in Chrysostom 140 boded by presence of Saturn in
of life 8, 63 horoscope 223
of loss 249 caused by excess of black bile 85
puer looking to senex for 168 chronicity of 9
pursuit of 3,71 digestive problems associated with
questions of, in religious melan 100
choly 161 heaviness and weight of 9, 17
redemptive, found through in women 236
creative work 180 involutional, former term for
menopause 226
304
INDEX
militaristic attitude to treatment of not to be confused with depressive

123 illness 82
shades of 257 prone to having second thoughts
somatic loci of 237 256
spiritual dimensions of, in Middle traditional fields suited to 236
Ages 132 melancholics
melancholia adusta 85 affinity with bats 24
melancholic temperament as children of Saturn 221
aggravated by too much cold 232 as dark-complexioned 5, 17-18,
and Seasonal Affective Disorder 77, 78
92 as having too many thoughts 273
and William James's "sick soul" as heroes and geniuses 119
157-158 as preserving a sense of history for
Aristotelian view of 140 society 174
as doing best in cooler climates as prone to sin 17
232 as unable to govern their memory
associated with heroism 119 177
attitude toward age 39 children as 178, 226-227
avarice typical of 21 choleric 87-90, 232
aversion to "mental health" 71 given to extremes 108—109
better understood by reversing made irritable by ungovernable
"balance" fantasy 109 memory 177
characteristics of 5, 8 natural 90-91
common among comedians 82 phlegmatic 86-87
compared to an itch that will not to be on guard against too much
go away 3 sleep 243
dog associated with 23 sanguine 90
early medieval representations of 17 thought to be touched with genius
examples of people with 78 71
Icarus as not having 200 women as 235
incompatible with sanguine melancholizing 4, 242
temperament 157 Melancholy
inheritance a primary factor in as daughter of Saturn 18
producing 246 as Muse 17
marked by qualities of black bile the Age of 35
91 melancholy See also melancholia
most fitting for asceticism and accompanied by shame 188-189
monastic life 140 and culture 8
305
INDEX
and Fate 229 as preparing one for death 179

and history 7 as state of mind-darkness 96
Aristotelian view of 140 associated with maturity 227
artificial 225, 241 being at risk, a secondary cause of
as a calling by Fate 21 250
as a form of soul-hunger 261 "bootstrap" approach to dealing
as a hazard of the religious life with 140
240 caused by sexual abstinence or
as a "normal" condition 83 promiscuity 239-241
as a secondary symptom 63 choleric 178
as a symptom of depression 71 Chrysostom's view of 138-140
as an affliction of the humanities contrasted with depression 220,
8 271-274
as antidote to mania of modern corrosive quality of 82
Western culture 5 covetousness as epitome of
as antidote to psychopathic (Burton) 244
inclination 193 depersonified 5
as assisting maturation process in epilepsy thought to be a form of,
children 227 by ancient Greek 119
as both physical and temperamen female mode of, considered
tal 80-81 pathology 102
as caused by imagination (Burton) generous/mild 223
244 Hildegard's view of 141
as caused by lack of sufficient sleep increased by milk and milk
242-243 products 237
as causing violence, in choleric inspired 178
men 89 located in lungs, according to
as coming from sin 133 Ancient Greeks 97
as divine punishment (Hildegard) male mode of, equated with
141 spirituality 102
as forcing the creation of culture 263 monastic 138
as having no particular focus 179 more likely caused by retention
as marking natural shift in than evacuation 238-239
psychological concerns 224 natural 241
as metaphorical condition of self- of old age 225
reflective soul 266 pathological 160, 161
as Muse that inspires creative work 5 pathologizing of 63, 69
as necessary to being human 63 poetic 264
306
INDEX
primary cause of, the stars as content of melancholy 175

(Paracelsus) 222 as mother of melancholy 173
psychological understanding of, drying out of, with old age 226
given by Ficino 266-267 modern tendency to literalize, a
religious 25, 160, 161, 163, 179, mistake 173
190, 194 Mesmer, Anton 54, 68
Renaissance formulation of 265- Metis 270
266 Michelangelo 8, 84, 85
significance of clenched fist for 21 Milton, John 17,18,22,190
sorrow as the mother and daughter miserliness 22
of 244 misery 23, 82, 101, 122, 137, 138,
subjective character of 265 139, 159, 202, 227, 238, 245,
the "new" 265 263, 272, 273
thought to produce the best misogyny 221, 234—235, 235
memory 176-177 Mnemosyne (memory) 173, 175
three factors that cause, in moderation
Burton's view 222 as killing passion 271
traditionally located in the lungs embodied by Zeus 270
99 excessive 110
two modes of melancholy 102 resisted by melancholics 111
two types, in Albertus Magnus's resulting in boredom and medioc
view 178 rity 107
universality of, in Hildegard's view wrong principle for melancholics
142 271
weakness of imagination as chief Moon 183, 220, 222, 223, 224
cause of 228 as having affinity for Saturn
William of Auvergne's view of (planet) 224
140 Morrison, Toni 123
Melancthon 83 mortality 19, 35, 92, 179, 180, 274
memory 68, 98, 99 Moses 206
and shame 210 motivation 8, 99
Aristotle on 173 mourning 8, 102, 123, 132, 206,
as a disease in modern times 173 247, 268
as a place of equal delight and Muse 4, 5, 10, 255, 261
torment 176 music
as a prison 175 as prescription for melancholic
as both gift and affliction of soul 260
melancholia 177
307
INDEX
N Ouranos 33, 100, 101, 269, 270

Ovid 205
Narcissus 258
Nash, Ogden 167 P
Nemesis 190,207,211,212
pain 4, 9, 11, 37, 89, 122, 137,
neurasthenia 51, 52, 53, 54, 58,
132 142, 152, 163, 169, 179, 180,
183, 198, 207, 209
neurosis 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 91,
pathological avoidance of 238
229
Panofsky, E. 79
anxiety neurosis 54
Pappenhausen, Bertha (Anna O.) 54
hysterical neurosis 55
Paracelsus 222
philosophical neurosis 144
New Age 169,238 paradox 5, 26, 80, 110, 147, 210,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 197 223, 233
paralysis 99, 248
Nijinski, Vaslav 178
paranoia 33, 35, 164, 223, 242, 270
norepinephrine 6, 7
parents
nostalgia 5, 157, 171, 179-181,
as transmitters of character 229
182, 183, 225, 228, 247, 273
for death 180 passion 5, 6, 9, 20, 41, 71, 78, 80,
84, 85, 87, 89, 97, 108, 110,
melancholic 180-181
113, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124,
О 160, 162, 176, 177, 178, 196,
227, 240, 244, 245, 263, 271,
obsession 21, 35, 84, 85, 111, 177, 277
207, 238 pathological melancholy See melan
old age 63, 86, 88, 91, 126, 159, choly: pathological
222, 224, 225, 227 pathology 7, 9, 17, 50, 58, 69, 70,
Olsen, Tillie 241 71, 76, 79, 80, 86, 90, 91, 110,
Olympus (Mount) 33, 118, 120 111, 160, 175, 207, 209, 210,
optimism 3, 4, 71, 76, 133, 157, 224, 229, 230, 265, 272
159, 162, 166, 167, 169, 170, Persephone 149, 179, 247-249
183, 189, 223, 255 pessimism 5, 179, 232, 240
opus contra naturam (work against in the medieval world 133
nature) 110 nostalgia as romantic aspect of 179
ordering of contemporary culture 167
in alchemy, differentiated from radical See radical pessimism
balancing 110 William James on roots of 159,189
Orestes 209 pessimist 159,166,245,264
308
INDEX
pessimistic view of life 142,157, materialistic and reductive view of

158, 167, 169, 232, 256, 272 246
Peter Pan 168 Psyche (goddess) 148-150, 240,
philosophical neurosis See neurosis: 258
philosophical neurosis psychoanalysis 7
Philostratus 244 psychology
phlegm 77, 79, 80, 83 as a sect of the religion of science
phlegmatic temperament 79, 86, 162
87, 88 as treating depression as pathologi
as doing best in cooler climates 232 cal weakness 58
phobias 53 collective fantasies of, informed by
phrenes (lungs) 97, 98 Saturn 164
Plato 119,121,177,244,265 conventional modern 258
Pleasure (Voluptas) 149 depth 81, 235
poena Adae 142 guilt a late arrival in human 204
Pollock, Jackson 40 Hillman's critique of scientistic
Pope, Alexander 142 and humanistic 257
Porter, Katherine Anne 241 Jung as working to put psyche
Presley, Elvis See Elvis Presley back into 258
pride 140, 147, 197, 203, 207, 208 modern 132, 161—162, 258, 264
“process of redemption” (William as ego-oriented 57
James) 161 as ignoring religious context of
progress 5, 7, 84, 147, 148, 165, depression 65-66
166, 189, 234 as locating pathology in
Prometheus 19, 53 individuals 90
Proust, Marcel 173 as viewing paucity of images as a
Prozac 7, 19, 180 symptom 259
psychasthenia 58, 132 language of, becoming sloppy
psyche 5, 23, 58, 64-65, 76, 77, 259
81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 89, 101, shame in the view of 191-192
110, 111, 124, 132, 139, 162, stripped of its Venusian sensual
168, 192, 204, 209, 221, 229, ity 162
235, 238, 240, 243, 247, 257, need for, to turn to Dionysus 162
259, 263, 272 of genetics 246
genuine language of 120 popular 120
images as spontaneous products of psychopathology 209, 257
260 psychopaths
all humans as 193
309
INDEX
as compensating for their lack remorse 149, 150

192 Renaissance
as lacking a sense of shame and as the beginning of modern
guilt 211-212 psychology 264
attracted to the ministry and Italian, contrasted with German
psychology 192 264
born as well as made 192 spirit, returning to "Know thyself"
chief characteristic of, inability to adage 265
feel shame 192 Renaissance humanism See human
imagined as sub-human monsters 192 ism: Renaissance
psychosomatic symptoms 100—101 Renaissance man 124, 264, 265
psychotherapy 88, 120, 141, 173, repression 53, 173, 269
227, 229, 245, 257, 258, 267, theory of 55
268 resignation 19, 69, 98
humanistic 245 reverie 10, 95, 175, 176, 180
puer (aeternis) 100, 124, 167, 168, Rhea 33,37
267, 269 righteous anger See anger: righteous
punishment 35, 119, 136, 137, Rockwell, Norman 40
141, 142, 150, 204, 205 Rodin, Auguste 17
Purgatory 112, 133 Roosevelt, Eleanor 8
R s
radical pessimism 157—161, 264 sadness 34, 80, 90, 98, 108, 159,
rage 5, 33, 85, 87, 97, 153, 182, 176, 271
203, 247 Sand, George (Aurore Dupin) 8
Raleigh, Sir Walter 117 sanguine temperament 41, 78
reading sanity 65, 119, 139
as the cause of hysteria in women sarcasm 3, 81
47-48 Saturn 18,21,22,23,24,33,34,
as the cause of nervous disorders in 35, 36, 37, 50, 79, 100, 101,
women 50 124, 126, 131, 137, 147, 148,
redemption 40, 132, 136, 159, 266 159, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167,
reflection 18, 71, 138, 160, 234, 179, 189, 190, 222, 223, 224,
264 225, 235, 238, 239, 255, 256,
regression 7, 126 257, 261, 265, 266, 267, 269,
religion 6, 8, 91, 132, 135, 161, 270, 271, 272
162, 235 and psychological impotence 41
310
INDEX
as archetypal miser 164 Scorpio 223, 224

as both protection and prison 38 Scrooge, Ebenezer 78, 256
as bringing deeper self-under “second birth” (William James) 161
standing 223 secular humanism See humanism:
as deaf 271 secular
as father of melancholia 72 self-esteem 57, 63, 88, 121, 133,
as god of (melancholic) introspec 144, 146, 191, 202, 260
tion 223 self-image 88, 144
as god of seasons 34 self-preservation 99, 164
as impotent 167 self-reflection 125, 148
as "keeper of the keys" 223 senex 100, 137, 167, 168, 267, 270
as misogynist 35, 167, 221, 223, serotonin 7
234-235 Sexton, Anne 8
as opposed to change 34 sexuality
as Swallower 34, 35-37, 167, female 239
256, 263 infantile and childhood 55
as the cause of many physical of puer and senex, not mature 168
illnesses 100 of the sanguine melancholic 90
as Tortuous Thinker 34, 37 Saturnine attitudes towards 165
associated with deafness 221 Shaffer, Peter 122
associated with digestive problems Shakespeare, William 6, 17, 75,
100 124, 177, 189, 201, 210, 256,
associated with dry melancholy 263, 265, 274, 277
101 shame
associated with knees 97 amor fati as loving one's 210
associated with melancholy and children 191
astrologically and alchemically and memory 210
221 as a prerequisite for true worship
associated with the ear and ear 210
problems 40 as antidote to guilt 210
dog associated with 23 as basis of one type of personality
dry, cold masculinity of 41 191
Saturn (planet) 222, 223, 224 as contributing to creativity 197-198
as having affinity for the Moon as important component of
224 melancholy 205
as the "dry" planet 223 as intolerable visibility 196-197
presence of, as a malevolent as pointing to religious nature of
influence 223 melancholy 189
311
INDEX
as primal 193-194, 195 melancholics as most prone to 17

as primary protection of naked melancholy as source of, in
humanity 190 medieval thinking 133
as psychological condition of of acedie 4, 168
insufficiency 204 of indolence 144
as reminder of our wounded of pride 140
condition 200-201 oppressive sense of, in melancholy
as the remembrance of one's 135
pathologies 210 origin of 159
associated with melancholy 273 original 141, 158, 160
connected to creativity 197 punishment of 35
contrasted with guilt 204—210 Sisyphus 96
inarticulate nature of 205 sleep
loss of 211-212 lack of sufficient, harmful to
naked body as primal image of, in melancholics 242
Genesis 197 too much, harmful to phlegmatic
of the Question 199-200 melancholics 243
pathological 208 sloth 4, 21, 22, 140, 168, 261
personified by goddess Aides 190 Socrates 119
synonymous with consciousness, solitude 129, 150, 151, 190, 233,
in Genesis 194-195 242, 267
“sick soul” (William James) 133, sorrow 8, 11, 19, 26, 34, 45, 58,
142, 157, 161, 169, 245 67, 76, 78, 83, 91, 97, 98, 119,
sin 126, 131, 137, 143, 146, 153,
acedie as 140, 164 160, 162, 176, 189, 217, 244,
agent of 231 245, 257, 260, 264, 272, 274,
Aquinas's view of 143 275
as cosmic disharmony 159 speed 53, 58, 59, 65, 141
as fall from state of innocence 159 spleen 23, 78, 97, 221
as taking guilt literally 207 spring (season) 56,78,91,92
Christian doctrine of 266 Stagirius (the monk) 138
Christian theology deeply con Stein, Murray 100-101, 269, 270
cerned with 164 Stern, Gerald 198
Dame Melancholy as a figure of 138 stress 50, 132, 133, 146
important for contemporary submission 19, 20, 144
therapy 133 suffering 19, 23, 51, 72, 91, 144,
melancholic temperament de 146, 150, 157, 160, 161, 163,
nounced as 21 164, 169, 189, 193, 209, 211,
312
INDEX
212, 236, 244, 245, 248, 249, V

257, 258, 264, 266, 271, 272
attitude of depression towards 273 van Gogh, Vincent 120,178
heroic/manic approach to 238 vanity 9, 144, 167
suffocation 98, 99, 100, 163, 203, vapeurs 46-50, 52, 54
235, 241 venery 52, 239, 240
suicide 8, 69, 71, 120, 138, 146, Venus
148, 161, 169, 180, 182, 234, degradation of, by modern culture
240, 249, 265 241
summer 56, 75, 78, 91, 92, 175 neglect of 144
superego 137, 204 omission of 239, 240, 241
superstition 32, 267 Venusian sensuality 162
swallowing See also Saturn: as Villanovus, Arnold 239
Swallower; Zeus: as swallowing violence 5, 86, 87, 89, 162, 235,
father 249
by God 36 vita speculativa 264
by institutions 165 volatility 88, 227
by the father 101, 265 Voluptas See Pleasure
of children 33, 35, 165-166, 221, von Franz, Marie Louise 267
263, 270
of protest 271
w
weakness 47, 48, 58, 59, 205, 227,
T
228
taedium 143 wear-and-tear syndrome 50-51,52
temper (tantrums) 8, 81, 88 Weil, Simone 178
Ten Commandments 204, 206 whiteness 237, 238
Tolstoy, Leo 120, 161, 256 William of Auvergne 140
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 8 Wilson, Woodrow 235
transformation 67, 78, 83, 87, 88, winter 79, 91, 226
99, 110, 147, 160, 168, 247, wisdom 5, 6, 18, 32, 37, 64, 65, 70,
262 107, 137, 167, 193, 200, 225,
tuberculosis 100 227, 256, 269
Twain, Mark 191 Woolf, Virginia 8
“twice-born” (William James) 169, “world-sickness” (William James)
245 159
wreath 19-21, 118, 130, 131
313
INDEX
Y
Yahweh 35
yellow bile 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83,
85, 87, 231
z
Zeus 20, 33, 89, 149, 270
as swallowing father 270
as Swallowing Father, differenti
ated from Saturn 270
314
Psychology
Portrait of the Blue Lady:

The Character of melancholy
“No doubt the first more or less conscious humanoid woke up with a headache, poor
appetite, worry about the day's dangers, lugging around heavy thoughts of death and the
meaning of life, while rummaging for a clean pelt to wear and a couple of clubs for
another grinding day at the hunt. “Not because of high carbon monoxide levels in his two-
story cave, not because she had an eating disorder, and not because he/she suffered from
low self-esteem, but because thoughts of death and the meaning of life are heavy, because
survival is hard, the hunt is grinding. Melancholy and its symptoms have been with us
always, as much a part of life as making love or making art, and as necessary to being
human as eating or calling in sick to work only because you'd rather do something else.
Once imagined in past centuries as an affliction from the gods and as a majestic
woman of power and wisdom, Dame Melancholy, the “Blue Lady, has been reduced to a
modern, impersonal clinical category. But we all get the blues sometimes, and how are
we to understand what is going on in the psyche in those blue moods? This book,
written in a lyrical style with wit and passion, intends to redeem melancholy and restore
it to its rightful place in the human psyche, as a Muse of creative force, a characteristic of
greatness, and a bittersweet comfort in the sensitive soul.
"Lyn Cowan brings the full weight of her keen intellect, the probing depth of her
analytic sensibility, a poet's gift for language, nuance, irony, metaphor, narrative, and
parable, and a rich, confessional, achieved personal style to a condition most common,
yet shunned and pathologized: melancholia. She explores, anatomizes, amplifies, and
depathologizes this universal mood, and recovers its proper role as a fecund, generative
place of soul, and, as Keats reminded us, the necessary companion to joy."
James “Hollis, Jungian Analyst, Executive “Director of the “Houston Jung Center
"They say that depression dams up creative energy until the river bursts its banks,
to personal and universal benefit. “If so, thank the Gods for it because Lyn Cowan's
scholarly and loving retrieval of melancholy from the slag heaps of the medical model
and psychopathology brims over with creativity, wit and lyricism. “Reading it is a reliable
therapy in itself. And, as you'd expect with an author who made her well-deserved
reputation as a writer one cannot overlook by travelling in some pretty dodgy areas,
there is no avoidance of the absolute shit that attends the blues."
Andrew Samuels, “Professor of Analytical “Psychology, “University of “Essex
About The Author

Lyn Cowan, ‘Ph.D., has been practicing as a Jungian analyst for
25 years. She has served as Director of Training for the ‘Inter
Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and then as ‘President of the
Society, and held a professorship for ten years in the doctoral
program for Clinical ‘Psychology of the Minnesota School for
Professional Psychology. Tier books include Tracking the
White R.abbit: A Subversive View of Modern Culture and
^Masochism: Я Jungian ‘View, and she has lectured throughout
the United States, Europe, and South Ameriса. Born and raised
in “New York, she lived in Minnesota for 42 years and now resides
in Houston, Texas.

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Portrait оf the

Spring Journal Books

© 2004 by Lyn Cowan.

Library in Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Reproduction of Albrecht Durer’s engraving, Melencolia I: Bequest of

PART I: THE BLUE LADY

PART II: DAME MELANCHOLY’S TALES

PART IV: PASSING THROUGH SATURN’S RINGS

CODA (Blues style)....................................................................... 279

Good morning heartache

I’ve turned and tossed until it seems you have gone

—“Good Morning Heartache,”

“A Melancholy of Mine Own ...”

I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is

—Jacques, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It

and even most eight-year-olds know something of pain, hardship, betrayal,

medical view of psychological melancholy has inhibited rather than contributed

Robert Burton: A Kindred Spirit

S book, a brief background of him is in order here. He was most

he direction of melancholy is not only down (and out, in the dumps, to

known to be solitary in their sorrow, we find a historical community in the

I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at

Goethe here touches all our themes: the chronicity of melancholia,

n this writing I am not much concerned with “justifications” and “proofs,”

THE BLUE LADY

So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly; ...

I lived a life but nothing I’ve gained

—“Worried Life Blues,”

Meeting the Blue Lady

C (1471-1528) did a series of engravings of “Dame Melancholy,” the

But hail! thou goddess sage and holy!

To hit the sense of human sight,

encirclement of the head to signify his submission to Zeus, and, more

The wreath worn by Dame Melancholy in Diirer’s engraving makes the

Now notice the Grindstone-. Even though the figure of Dame

sphere. Durer portrays one of the profound torments and paradoxes of

DAME MELANCHOLY’S TALES

Then I considered all that my hands had done

A lady so fine and soulful

Dame Melancholy’s Family

Dame Melancholy’s Story of Saturn

y Father, Saturn—first called “Chronos”—was a great king in the

Great Kronos devoured all his children as soon as each of them

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

You must understand, Dr. Burton, that as god of time, Chronos/Saturn

Author’s Interjection: Saturn in the Middle Ages

ith the ascendancy of Christianity in the medieval period in Western

W Europe, the image of Saturn underwent a partial metamorphosis.

His hunger is immensely great; He consumes us entirely to the

Who cannot immediately think of Goya’s shocking and horrific image

I am in a vast factory basement, where tired old men tend huge

the tender but already patriarchally damaged age of twenty-two, I had

I am in a place like the Garden ofEden with other people-beings.

As Mother Rhea found a way to rescue her children from the

SCENE: Brooklyn, New York, Long Island, 1913-1973

He took care of his family as best he could: mated, fathered, husbanded,

Metamorphosis of the Blue Lady

G it must be burdensome for you ...” Dame Melancholy looked at

Dame Melancholy’s Tale of Her Future History

y position has never been so precarious in the esteem of humans as it

The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers,

Of course, a hundred years later, men will completely change their

America, a young and rapidly growing nation with religious