Melancholia generosa

"Il saggio mira ad analizzare il graduale processo storico di parziale sovrapposizione, sostituzione ed ampliamento del paradigma teoretico della depressione rispetto a quello della melanconia. La prima parte è dedicata ad analizzare alcuni dei tratti nevralgici delle polivalenti tematizzazioni della malinconia avvenuti nel corso della modernità, anche in relazione allo spirito del capitalismo (nella sua accezione weberiana). Segue una panoramica sulla nascita della categoria moderna di depressione, e del processo che nel corso del XX secolo l’ha condotta alla sua trasformazione in un paradigma teoretico e nosologico che ha infine sostituito quello della melanconia. La seconda parte rappresenta il tentativo di elaborare una Zeitdiagnose: l’obiettivo è valutare l’impatto psicosociale di natura ‘depressiva’ esercitato da particolari meccanismi socioeconomici e tendenze culturali, con particolare riferimento a ciò che è stato definito il «nuovo spirito del capitalismo», nonché alle nuove forme dell’individualismo e alle loro dinamiche paradossali. In conclusione viene gettato un ponte tra la storia dei due suddetti paradigmi e le dinamiche psicosociali contemporanee correlate al fenomeno oggi interpretato quale «epidemia depressiva».

The essay aims to analyse the gradual historical process of the partial overlap, replacement and expansion of the theoretical paradigm of depression with respect to that of melancholy. The first part is devoted to analysing some of the central features of the multivalent thematizations of melancholy drawn up during modernity, also with relation to the spirit of capitalism (in its Weberian acceptation). This is followed by an overview of the birth of the modern category of depression, and the process that during the twentieth century led to its transformation into a theoretical and nosological paradigm which in the end replaced that of melancholy. The second part is the attempt to draw up a Zeitdiagnose: the aim is to assess the ‘depressive’ psychosocial impact exercised by particular socio-economic mechanisms and cultural trends, with particular reference to what has been defined as the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, as well as the new forms of individualism and their paradoxical dynamics. In conclusion, I will form a bridge between the history of the two aforesaid paradigms and the contemporary psychosocial dynamics correlated to the phenomenon today interpreted as a ‘depression epidemic’."

The paper analyze the crucial moment of rupture in the history of the definitions, descriptions and classifications of melancholy within the ambit of medicine that occurred between the end of the Eighteenth- and beginning of the Nineteenth-century, in particular in France. That is the point at which Philippe Pinel, absorbing the
contributions of Seventeenth-century British psychiatry, proceeded to abandon both the humoral doctrine and the old Renaissance conception of the dual character – melancholy as a psycho-physiological illness and as a literary and philosophical mood. Pinel now locates melancholy only among forms of mental alienation. I will proceed with the subsequent contributions made by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, who explicitly refused to attribute to melancholy that particular form of duality that was attributed to it in the Renaissance. More generally, I will seek to locate the new conceptualisations of melancholy within the wider scientific and cultural context of nascent modern psychiatry, and of the clinical forms to which it leads. It was in this context that a strict theoretical and therapeutic programme was launched, which aimed at the systematic medicalization of all the human passions and emotions, and proposed, at the same time, their treatment in a vast body of public and private institutions, specifically set up for the purpose. Thus, a variety of figures gradually came to be transformed: suffice it to think of the melancholic poet, the impassioned lover, the fanatic rebel, and their transfigurations and transpositions in literature and theatre. In other words, this is the end of the old renaissance fashionable melancholy.