På leting etter et tapt språk: om psykoanalyse og melankoli

Abstract

This article focuses on melancholia and how melancholia presents a language for essential individual and cultural aspects of life. It is argued that melancholia is on its way out of general psychology which represents a loss as melancholia offers knowledge of important existential human conditions. It also gives a language for normality and pathology, something creative and something potentially destructive in human. Psychoanalytic understanding of melancholia is presented together with extracts from a psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a patient. Keywords: melancholia, depression, psychoanalysis