Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

"In his essay Mourning And Melancholia Freud states that melancholia, like mourning, is a reaction of grief to the loss of a loved object. "In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself."[3] Therefore, mourning is grief over the loss of someone or something beloved. Melancholia is grief over the loss of the ego. "With one exception, the same traits (of melancholia) are met with in mourning,"[4] Freud states. Melancholia remains an unnatural open wound; mourning, a natural process, frees the participant upon its completion. The mourning or death process is similar to the creative process the mourning process is a death process for the living in which the participant travels the cycle of adjustment when a loved one leaves. In the death process one may or may not find permanent rebirth, but one loses self-awareness and so achieves a temporary rebirth at least. In the mourning process, one must find rebirth; if not, one is in a cycle of melancholia instead. The mourning/death process, likened to the creative process,[5] gives new life, new art, new form.
Freud says the need to be an artist comes from early childhood and a sense of loss that enables the artist to see things differently. This vision rules his life. Not entirely neurotic, not entirely normal, the artist is endowed with a creative personality and a ruthless passion that allows him to separate his own grief feelings of melancholia from his grief feelings of mourning (death/rebirth or creativity cycle). Longing for normalcy, the artist is constantly fought by his need for art, by his vision, by his inner life. Beset by melancholia, his ruthless passion for his inner life during his session (days, weeks, months) of producing an art work separates him from his neurosis. Grief is interpreted as mourning, not depression. Mourning, a positive process in life, leads the sufferer to change and growth, to a kind of rebirth, to a condition previously unknown.
Therefore, it is Joyce's language of grief, not of melancholy, which in Portrait (as well as in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) surges and ebbs, exceeds traditional edges, is sometimes extinguished, but then is revived. This language is left in a new place, in a new form."

MOURNING OR MELANCHOLIA:
JOYCE'S DEATH FIXATION AND THE 'CALYPSO' CHAPTER IN ULYSSES

REPORTED BY ALLEGRA WONG

"Mother, Living Things Change!": The Korean Mother/Daughter Conflicts in

Bak Wan-seo's Namok and Eomma-ui Malttuk

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