Andrey Rossokhin read for us a book by Yulia Kristeva “Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy”
Y. Kristeva “Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy”, Kogito-Center, 276 p.
Julia Kristeva (Julia Kristeva, born in 1941) is an outstanding French psychoanalyst and philosopher. He teaches at leading universities in Europe and the USA. Her books have been translated into Russian: “The Forces of Horror. An Essay on Disgust” (Aletheia, 2003), “Selected Works. The Destruction of Poetics (ROSSPEN, 2004) and the historical novel Death in Byzantium (AST, 2008).
“Yulia Kristeva is a scientist and intellectual, one of the most famous and respected personalities in the international scientific and cultural environment. A student of the structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes, she played a leading role in creating the language of post-structuralism. Her name and works are well known to Russian philosophers and linguists. But, paradoxically, they are little known to psychologists and psychoanalysts. Moreover, it is the psychoanalytic approach to understanding the problems of personality, language, literature, philosophy, anthropology that is the main one in Kristeva’s work. It is hard to believe that the author of more than 40 books on psychoanalysis, philosophy, semiotics, as well as several novels, is a psychoanalyst whose days since 1979 have been filled with work with patients. In Black Sun, Kristeva talks about melancholy. About that bottomless sadness, that pain that cannot be expressed, which sometimes completely absorbs us, forcing us to lose the taste for any speech, any action, the taste for life itself. “Where does this black sun of melancholy and depression rise from?” Kristeva asks. Mental trauma – love or professional failure, grief that happened to loved ones – all this often turns out to be just a trigger for inner despair, which in the very depths of the psyche feeds on the unexperienced and unconscious loss of a beloved object, which is most often the omnipotent mother of our early childhood. . Melancholia is the most severe form of depression, an experience comparable to the depths of hell. But only with the awareness of loss, which reveals to each of us the real presence of death in our lives, we are born and develop as individuals.
ONLY BY DISCOVERING THE REAL PRESENCE OF DEATH CAN WE GROW PERSONALLY.
This book allows you to get in touch not only with the multifaceted work of Yulia Kristeva, but also with herself. Through the fate of literary characters, artistic canvases, archaic myths that come to life when reading this book, through the suffering inner worlds of patients, we communicate, empathize, reflect and talk with the author – a wise and subtle psychoanalyst, a loving woman and a free-thinking person.