On Melancholy : Robert Romanyshyn

I cannot accept.. the idea that melancholy is a neurotic condition. But this is precisely the view with Sigmund Freud espoused in his seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” For Freud, melancholia was a failed mourning, specifically a kind of denial on the part of the ego mind to let go of the one who has died…. My experience of melancholy, however, convinces me that it is precisely the opposite of what Freud said….. Melancholy did not chain me to the past. On the contrary, it liberated me into the present, where I am more attentive to the tenuous beauty of the moment, more appreciative of it. In melancholy, I linger just a little longer with the other, perhaps to take a deeper look or perhaps to hold the hand just a fraction longer, because I know that this moment will not come again.

I believe Freud missed this poignant character of melancholy because he was looking at grief and mourning from the vantage point of the ego mind and not, strangely enough, from the vantage point of the soul. I know for myself that here were many moments when I felt hustled and hurried back into busyness, and I was even somewhat criticised for my melancholy. To some of my friends, it was as if I was wallowing in a slough of despair. But I was not. On the contrary, I was being led by the soul on its winter journey through mourning, living according to its rhythms which were beyond my control. In mourning, the soul was dissolving my own personal loss in the larger story of love and loss which characterised the round of all creation.

The journey of grief through mourning into melancholy always has this power to connect us this larger story of love and loss, a story which reaches even to the stars. I know that there have been many moments when the vast expands of the night sky has been the exact mirror of my melancholic soul, when this midnight sky embraced me, made me feel at home, and filled me with a sense of what I once had and had lost or forgotten or left behind was this cosmic connection, this feeling that I did belong to the round dance of a divine holy creation. In this respect, the patients whom Freud saw were, I believe, expressing through their personal sorrows the hunger of the ego mind for this connection, a connection that was lost when centuries ago we severed our ties to the world and created that ego mind which with its symptoms limped into Freud’s consulting room in the latter part of the last century. Through personal loss and the mourning process, the modern ego mind was expressing this grief over its lost relation to the soul and its wider field of love. In this respect, I believe that melancholy is a way the soul deepens mind and seeks to restore to personal life, its collective and transpersonal dimensions.

It was this larger story of loss and grief speaking through the mourning but Freud lacked the cosmic vision to hear it. To hear the melancholy of the soul as something other than a neurotic symptoms, we would, in fact, have to go back to an earlier time, perhaps five hundred years ago, when melancholia was one of the four styles of temperament. Each of them described a person whose basic mood or disposition was the expression of a complex relation between the humours of the body and the stars. If we have lost our appreciation for these terms, it is because we have lost our connection to the larger picture, where our soul and stars are one.

My own grief, mourning, and the melancholy which has flowered from them, have led me back to this appreciation of the larger story. The soul’s way has been the guide, and on its path, I have come to cherish the singularity of each moment, each one of which will never come again, and anyone of which could be the last.

Robert Romanyshyn

The Soul in Grief : Love, Death and Transformation

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