Black Bile
Ascribing melancholia to a country or people could be as dicey a proposition as talking about a sovereign state's proprioception: just how much metaphorical slippage is a reader supposed to bear? The beauty of melancholia is that, historically, it is also based on what we might now think of as a confusion between the physical and the abstract. Melancholia was originally one of the four humors that the Greeks believed governed human behavior, before it became the term for a mood disorder and eventually losing out to "depression" as diagnostic category. Literally meaning "black bile," melancholia can also be rendered in English as "melancholy." Scholars writing about melancholia as a psychological condition or medical diagnosis usually prefer the Greek word to the more prosaic "melancholy." I chose "melancholy" for this book's title as a matter of legibility, but I use the terms interchangeably; my justification is that the post-Soviet phenomenon I am describing is neither medical nor strictly psychological.
Though modern psychology prefers "depression" to "melancholia," it was one of the fathers of modern psychology who led the way for its survival as something other than a strict diagnostic category. Sigmund Freud's 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia" isolated the phenomenon as something more narrow than general depression, but with ramifications that depression itself does not have. For Freud, melancholia is a disordered reaction to loss. When a loved one dies, we mourn (a typical and healthy process of grieving), but mourning that becomes obsessive and debilitating is properly classified as melancholia. The two phenomena appear to have a common cause; as Freud writes, the "exciting causes due to environmental influences are...the same for both conditions:"
Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition. It is also well worth notice that, although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful (243-244).
Welcome back, Freud
In a sense, Freud's definition of mourning is exactly what the average mourner is most afraid of: for him, the "work of mourning" is only complete when the mourner has managed to emotionally disengage from the departed. In other words, to feel less attached. Because loss is a part of reality, and
“respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit [...] and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. [...]t is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (244-245).
Through this work, mourners are therefore obliged to accomplish what they are the least inclined to do: to work through the grief and move on. To aid this difficult process, cultures and religions the world over have proscribed rituals whose purpose is to shape the process of mourning and bring it to its conclusion. Melancholics, however, are unable to complete the mourning process, because their relationship with the lost object is conflicted.
While both mourning and melancholia are characterized by “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, [and] inhibition of all activity,” according to Freud, only melancholia features "a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (244).
Melancholia for Freud is a variety of narcissism, a conclusion that Priscilla Roth extends further. In "Melancholia, Mourning and the Countertransference," Roth argues that losing the loved object itself is not what causes harm: "the danger is to the person's sense of himself, which depends on his sense of an ongoing internal attachment to his loved object” (38). Following Melanie Klein, Roth concludes that the melancholic maintains attachment to the "internal object" (the version of the loved one that one incorporates into one's self) while projecting the positive feelings onto a new external object at the expense of the one that is lost: “This is the double identification of melancholia—on the one hand taking over the qualities of the object of desire and, on the other, projecting the unwanted feelings of worthlessness into the object who is identified with the unloved self" (44).
My intent here is not to diagnose some mythical or essential "Russian mentality" (or worse, "Russian soul"), nor do I wish to describe a condition that somehow applies to all individual Russian citizens by default. There is no attempt to peek inside the heads of Russia's leader; the sheer volume of speculation about the inner workings of Vladimir Putin's mind shows how depressing and self-defeating an activity that would be. All riddles of Russianness will remain comfortably wrapped in mystery, safe within their enigma. Rather than plumb the dubious depths of a national psyche, I want to continue the practice that I have developed in my previous work: to focus on the artistic, political, ideological, and media discourses that define Russia for itself. It is these discourses that are profoundly melancholic.
As a concept, discursive melancholia need neither claim access to the inaccessible (that is, the conscious minds of individuals or groups, or, even worse, their unconscious) nor pathologize an entire people through the appropriation of a term that, historically, has had the force of psychiatric diagnosis. Many critics after Freud have brought the study of melancholia beyond the level of individual psychology, most notably Julia Kristeva. Elaine Miller describes Kristeva's elaboration of melancholia as "a kind of world-forming activity" that "transcends the individual and must be understood as a relation between self and world that cannot be 'cured’” (11).
Even more productive are the innovations made recently by scholars of disability studies whose work on neurodiversity provides a useful model. Melani Yergau's Authoring Autism and Julie Miele Rodas's Autistic Disturbances borrow from queer theory's investigations of the queerness of artistic texts rather than queer characters to make a similar advancement in the literary scholarship on autism, shifting their attention from characters who may or may not display autistic traits to the narratives in which these same characters are presented. Both Yergau and Rodas discover autistic rhetorical strategies and uses of language whose importance does not depend on the presence of an actually autistic character. Russia need not be a land of melancholics for the prevailing discourse to be melancholic through and through. [1]
Note
[1] I make a similar argument about the television series that is the subject of my book, HBO's The Leftovers: Mourning and Melancholy on Premium Cable(2023).
Next: Who Owns the Soviet Past?