Melancholia, Draft G (1895)
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).
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Figure 1
In the upper right corner, Freud has scrawled the phrase Normalschema or “normal scheme,” referring to the development of melancholia in someone suffering from anxiety and depressive disorders. This occurs in a few different ways.
Figure 2
The upper diagram represents anxiety neurosis as deviations from the normal pathways of sexual energy and sensation.
Here, sexual energy diverts back from the psyche into the body, rather than being projected outwards onto an external object or person.
Figure 3
Freud believed that the effect of this thwarted movement was a subdued sexual energy—here represented as a branching line leading to Angst (anxiety) and melancholia.
Figure 4
In the bottom diagram, Freud describes a situation where excessive masturbation makes the genitals (marked E for “end organ”) less sensitive to sexual stimulation.
Figure 5
While the strength of sexual stimuli (marked as s.S.) does not change, the level of the psychic sexual stimuli (ps. G.) diminishes.
Figure 6
This results in various cases of neurasthenia—among those, Freud classifies frigidity and impotence.
