Melancholia and a Response to AIDS in the Arts
by Professor David Gere, UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures
Melancholia and a Response to AIDS in the Arts
by Professor David Gere, UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures
In a 1917 essay titled Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, began a career-long meditation on the manner in which the human psyche deals with loss. "Mourning," he wrote, "is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person…. We rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be overcome, and we look upon any interference with it as inadvisable or even harmful." This is grief at the "normal" register. By contrast, "melancholia," though sharing many of the surface characteristics of "mourning," is identified by Freud as a pathological illness, marked by an inability to recover from the loss, to "overcome" it, and to return to daily activities. Thus, "the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound," a wound that refuses to heal, a loss that cannot be salved.
A Paradox of Grief and Anger
The art critic Douglas Crimp co-opted Freud's essay as a springboard for arguing the necessity of AIDS activism. Crimp's 1989 essay "Mourning and Militancy" suggests that the reintegration inherent in Freud's mourning process is denied to gay men living in the shadow of AIDS and confronted by pervasive homophobia. The "violence of silence and omission" of such prejudice causes an inveterate melancholy, which "the gay man [must] transform…to activism in the crucible of his righteous anger." This melancholic activism - a seeming conundrum - is visible in my field of dance in the increasingly subtle choreographic responses to AIDS and sexual discrimination.
Continue reading this topic:
- Clinical Depression Then and Now
- The Philosophic History of Melancholy
- Melancholy and a Response to AIDS in the Arts
- High School is Not a Place for Moping: Teaching Ideas