Melancholia and Sex

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Melancholia and Sex

Melancholia, from the Greek for "black bile," is the more modern medical term for melancholy, which has for centuries referred to symptoms of sadness, listlessness, despair, sullenness, and gloom. Black bile was one of the four humors, or fluids, that ancient Greek and Middle Eastern physicians once believed governed the body's moods and dispositions. The others are blood, associated with courage and love; yellow bile, associated with anger and moral indignation; and phlegm, associated with calm detachment. In Elizabethan times melancholia was thought to indicate refinement, and Shakespeare's noble Hamlet is to this day the most famous melancholic in English literature. Melancholia was understood to be more than passing sadness, and was understood, like the more contemporary clinical depression, to be a chronic condition that could completely define a person's character, personality, physical constitution, and larger outlook on the world.

In 1917, Sigmund Freud published "Mourning and Melancholia," an essay that distinguished a difference between mourning, where a lost object is the source of conscious grief, and melancholia, where the loss is unconscious or unknown. In melancholia the person experiencing unconscious grief cannot move beyond sadness, and exhibits symptoms such as loss of self-esteem, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, obsessive remorse, and obsessive self-rebuke. Freud theorized that this self-rebuke is a result of the melancholic person internalizing a lost love-object, and as a result, the sad and angry feelings that might have been directed at the lost love become directed at the internalized love, now part of the self. Thus the woman who seems to berate herself for being such a bad woman that her lover was forced to leave her is actually berating her lover for leaving her. The melancholic can no longer direct feelings at the lost person, so she instead becomes the person she has lost, and directs her feelings of anger, bitterness, and sadness against herself.

Freud thought the reason this melancholic internalization, or incorporation, happens is due to the ambivalence of love relationships in general. Since most people have mixed feelings about being in love, the loss of a lover can be blamed on the self for desiring the loss of the lover in the first place. Suicide, Freud argued, is the splitting off of the hateful and sadistic impulses directed at the lost love-object and the turning of that hate against the self. This process is aided by identification with the lost object, wherein the jilted lover becomes as much as possible like the person who has left her. Freud later argues in The Ego and the Id (1923) that the internalizing and sustaining of lost loves that happens in both mourning and melancholia is important for ego formation, and that identification with lost loves may be the only way one can eventually give them up.

For Freud, melancholia is not necessarily a part of gender formation, though gender and sexuality do develop around loss, specifically around the child's response to the traumatic realization that the mother lacks a penis. The "normal" child is supposed to realize—if she is a girl—that she doesn't have a penis, can't desire her mother, and needs to love a man in order to get a baby with a penis; or—if the child is a boy—that he could lose his penis if he doesn't identify with his father and desire a woman who is not his mother. In both cases, the mother is lost as an object of desire, though the boy doesn't have to give up all women (as the little girl does). He cannot, however, desire his father, any more than the little girl can remain attached to her mother.

Judith Butler has taken up Freud's notion of melancholy identification to argue that gender itself is a melancholic identification in which the same-sex parent one is not allowed to desire, and who is thus lost as a love object, is internalized or incorporated. Butler's notion of gender as melancholy incorporation combines Freud's theory of castration as the cause of childhood sex and gender development with the idea that melancholia can also cause sex and gender development.

Butler points out that boys and girls might identify with the mother they have lost, desire her, or both. Little girls might internalize the mother they are not supposed to desire, and keep that desire alive as a lesbian desire, whereas little boys might identify with the mother and desire their fathers, or incorporate the fathers they are not allowed to desire into themselves as love-objects. At this point gender and sexual object choice become murkily intertwined in Butler's argument, much as they are in Freud's explanation of castration and the Oedipal resolution; in Butler, homosexuality determines gender somehow, whereas Freud similarly conflates heterosexual object choice and having a "normal" femininity or masculinity. However, Butler's theory of gender as melancholic—the reason she prefers we view gender this way—presents homosexuality as "natural" a psychic process of subject formation as heterosexuality (which takes shape in much the same way) and should not be viewed as a bad or inauthentic copy.

The problem with viewing gender as melancholy, of course, is that melancholia is associated with the sadness and listlessness of depression, and melancholic homosexual subject-formation thus seems sick and sad rather than healthy and active.

HIV/AIDS activist Douglas Crimp uses melancholia to think about responses to AIDS in the gay community, arguing that a deep sense of loss and mourning has led to melancholia in most gay men, which in turn has caused a malaise surrounding AIDS activism. He sees this melancholia as the reason gays have rejected their sex-positive culture in favor of mainstream monogamy and political conservatism, and argues that moving beyond the stasis of melancholia will facilitate a return to activism, a return to self-affirming safe sexual practices of all varieties, and a rejection of self-hating conservative gay pundits like Andrew Sullivan.

Other contemporary discussions of melancholia and sex occur around the widespread use of antidepressants, along with the equally widespread side effects of sexual dysfunction and depressed libido that seem to accompany the use of many of these drugs. Rather than enabling sexual identification, in this context melancholia is seen as something that neutralizes sexuality altogether, leading some writers to blame lack of interest in sex not on drugs, or even depression itself, but on a culture where unhappiness is taboo. In this culture, they argue, the dark yearning for connection that causes us to seek intimacy with each other has been replaced with the sunny artificiality of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, such as Prozac and Lexapro; these drugs take us out of ourselves just enough to work, but not enough to desire each other. In an argument that brings us back to Freud, they assert that restoring a healthy and productive notion of sadness to our happiness-obsessed culture will lead to a better balance that will allow us to escape melancholia, in large part, because we have stopped trying so hard to repress any sign of sadness in our lives.