A Keatsian Anatomy of Melancholy: aesthetic conflict and the management of depression

Abstract

This paper considers the changing picture of depression, or melancholy as it was called in the seventeenth century, as in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Freud distinguished between mourning and melancholia in the sense of healthy and pathological reactions to loss; but the concept has also evolved within psychoanalysis, as in Klein’s ‘On the sense of loneliness’. The process of working through depression with a goal of self-knowledge seems to come gradually closer to a Keatsian worldview of the quest for beauty and truth, in line with Meltzer’s ‘aesthetic conflict’. Using some of Keats’ letters and poems from the winter and spring of 1818–1819, the paper traces his analysis of his own depression, as he works out how to exorcise its persecutory qualities, and learns to ‘see great things in loneliness’. His understanding of the two types of melancholy, depressive and persecutory, culminates in his ‘Ode on Melancholy’.

Keywords:

• Aesthetic conflict
• melancholy
• depression
• Keats
• Klein
• Meltzer

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meg Harris Williams

Meg Harris Williams is a writer and lecturer on literature and psychoanalysis and a visual artist. She teaches internationally and is a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic, an honorary member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California, and editor of The Harris Meltzer Trust. Her books and papers include: The Apprehension of Beauty, The Vale of Soulmaking (2005), The Aesthetic Development (2010), Bion’s Dream (2010), The Art of Personality in Literature and Psychoanalysis (2017), Dream Sequences in Shakespeare (2021), and Donald Meltzer: A Contemporary Introduction (2021). Website: www.artlit.info.