Today, arguing in favor of the psychoanalytic view of depressive states is likely to be hopeless, not so much for epistemological reasons, but because most contemporary clinicians (including many psychodynamically-oriented therapists) have lost sight of the intuitions at the core of the Freudian and post-Freudian visions of mourning and bereavement. This paper, through a close reading of one of Henry James’s most praised short stories, almost a contemporary of Freud’s work on melancholia, offers a detour back to the origin of this misunderstanding. It is a plea for the aesthetic, philosophical, and anthropological re-education of therapists, upstream from the conceptual quandaries that have plagued an ill-founded refutation of psychoanalytic views on depression.
CITATION STYLE
Castel, P. H. (2016). Loss, Bereavement, Mourning, and Melancholia: A Conceptual Sketch, in Defence of Some Psychoanalytic Views. In History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences (Vol. 15, pp. 109–119). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7423-9_8
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