Aproximación a la melancolía. Una comparación entre dos perspectivas: la freudiana y la cristiana

Abstract

The melancholia is the most ancient pathos which is renowned, present along multitude of writings and art works from the Antiquity, and it was mentioned in the first treatises of Medicine. Its name refers to the "black humour" of the Greek Hippocratic theory, and its principal feature has always been sadness and detachment to life. Nowadays the Psychological and Psychiatric models tends to identify it superficially with the depressive and deficit of mental illness, but this significance becomes deeper in the Philosophy field: melancholia is the background of human existence, culture, desire, mental health and proactive activity; it's a philosophical, immanent and transcendent mystery, where the big questions of Psychology intertwine with those of Religion, and to whose profile this thesis has wanted to contribute an interpretation, which is a result of personal and scientific research. The human melancholia is, briefly, the history of our traumas and losses, the existential nothingness of the mortal and wretched being. Numerous approaches could tackle it, and for this thesis it's been chosen to make a comparative between two perspectives that have sufficient complexity: the psychoanalytic and meta-psychological work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) about melancholia, and what represents the doctrine of the Christian religion, specially in the reflections of some of the more contemporary thinkers -theologians, philosophers or psychologists-, who are narrowly linked with the lessons and genuine revelations of Jesus of Nazareth. In this regard, there is information coming from Antoine Vergote's psychoanalytic interpretation, Paul Ricoeur's phenomenology and hermeneutics, the New Catholic Theology's christological and soteriological integration -under Bernard Sesboüé's guidance-, the Liberation Theology's prophetic denunciation, and the pastoral message of faith and hope by Pope Francis; as well as the analysis of the experience and meaning of the Christian's mysticism, with references to the saint Carmelite reformers – St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross-, and also the example par excellence of melancholia in the Bible: Job. Of the psychoanalytic reading, a complete tour has been carried out throughout all Freud's writings which refer to the phenomena and clinic of melancholia, from the first manuscripts of the turn of the century to the last meta-psychological works that culminate his career, doing a special emphasis in the years of 1914-1915, concerning the drama of the First World War which affects deeply in the author's thought, about the drive, and topic, configuration of psychic system, the transformations of the economic and dynamic model, the discovery of narcissism and implications in the identification theory and, finally, the progressive capitulation of Freudian Psychoanalysis to the death drive. Melancholia is the phenomena that turns out to be dominant along this theoretical development, and the reference text is Mourning and melancholia, the composition of which was 100 years old in this thesis is presented. The analysis has also in mind the influence that the collaboration by Freud’s main disciple supposed in this field: Karl Abraham (1877-1925), mentor of the object relationship theory...