The Swedish researcher Karin Johannison has written an extremely entertaining story of melancholy — not as a disease, but as a feeling. It turns out that despondency, vulnerability, anxiety, fatigue and even horror are all varieties of melancholy…
The social and cultural history of feelings must be constantly kept in mind in a society disturbed by thoughts of its (un)well-being, Swedish researcher Karin Johannison is convinced. Melancholy (“happiness from being in sadness”, in the words of Victor Hugo) occupies a special place in Western culture. Focusing his interest on melancholy as a feeling (rather than an illness or mood), Johannison, following Freud, defines it as the loss of something incomprehensible and difficult to express. She identifies three periods and three varieties of this feeling: black, characterized by vivid bodily manifestations and manias (ancient), gray — with a more closed, depressive language (the turn of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries) and modern, white, with accompanying feelings of fatigue and emptiness. But that’s not all: Johannison defines seven types of melancholy: despondency, vulnerability, boredom, horror, flight or vagrancy, anxiety, fatigue. Different shades of this feeling are illustrated by literary quotations — Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Virginia Woolf … All conditions in order to plunge into melancholy and … defeat it. “To do this, you just need to “recognize it as a space for self-reflection,” the author is sure. Allow immersion in yourself, in your body, in your thoughts, moods, anxieties.
UFO, 320 p.