Melancholia, Draft G (1895)

Click anywhere in the image to explore in more detail.

Drawing of the Structure of Melancholia

This is one of four drawings attempting to understand the structure of melancholia that Freud sent to Wilhelm Fliess (undated, but likely January 7, 1895).  “The affect corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning—that is, longing for something lost,” Freud writes.  “Melancholia consists in mourning over the loss of libido.”  The draft distinguishes between two main schemas: “The Normal Schema” and “The Sexual Schema.”  "The Normal Schema," the most difficult to decipher of the four, illustrates how such a loss manifests in two major ways: anxiety neurosis and neurasthenic melancholia. In both cases, sexual energy cannot bind to an object and therefore circulates in perpetuity, causing the inversion of the sexual drive and resulting in melancholia.  Freud conceptualized melancholia here neurologically, modelling these drawings on a reflex arc—a neural pathway that controls a reflex—in an attempt to isolate and incorporate higher cognitive functions crucial to the development of melancholic personality. The complexity this image conveys may be seen to mirror Freud’s tentativeness on the subject.  “The affective processes in melancholia,” he wrote 15 years later, “are totally unknown to us.”  However, within two more years, Freud was characterizing melancholia as a psychological phenomenon in his well known paper, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917).

Click here to see full-size image.

Return