The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression
By Darian Leader
Hamish Hamilton £17.99, 240 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

In 1915, Freud produced a remarkable paper: Mourning and Melancholia. This became a cornerstone in the psychoanalytic theory of melancholia – a more poetic word than the topographical “depression” – an affliction that has now supplanted hysteria as the principal occasion for seeking relief from emotional suffering. Freud argued that while the two conditions appear alike, melancholia was more than, and fundamentally different in kind from, an extended period of grieving for the dead or absent. This was a category distinction: mourning is a response to a depleted world; melancholia to a sense of radical personal diminishment. According to Freud, the unconscious of the melancholic – or depressive, as we now say – has become so embroiled with the lost other, that the boundaries of selfhood become disastrously erased.

As a corollary to this experience of existential depredation, love and hate, once directed at the all-powerful absentee, are deflected back on to the sufferer. So arise those “plaints”, as Freud calls them, that characterise the depressive: “dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings”. So too, like an invisible necromancer working a diabolical spell, the lost but never-forgotten other puts the depressive’s vital attachment to life in thrall.

Darian Leader’s The New Black takes Freud’s speculations and attempts to revive them in a modern context. Since psychotropic drugs are now presumed to be the supreme method of treating depression, Leader’s stout challenge to this faith in pharmaceuticals is welcome. The complex interplay between mind and body is still a mystery, but anyone who has blushed, gone pale with shock, or had an erection, has witnessed the truth that our physical systems are subject to our emotions – as much as the other way round. Leader levels the charge that Freud’s “talking cure” has a virtue which is ignored, for economic rather than remedial reasons. He also joins the current dispute over cognitive behaviour therapy, the trend for using words not drugs, but without the rewards of deeper reflection that psychoanalysis, at its best, provokes.

So far so good. I really wanted to like this book – the topic is rich and the protest timely. The trouble is, it lacks the boldness of Freud’s original and little more is made of the century-old conjectures. It is not well enough recognised that Freud built on the nest of his own theories, adding to it, or brazenly changing his mind. Leader imports the bare bones of these 1915 ideas without giving them enough flesh to explore the province of uncharted thought, psychoanalysis’s most fertile destination. Nor does he sufficiently illuminate Freud’s crucial – even if debateable – intellectual distinction between the two, seemingly similar, states of melancholia and mourning. The book could have been edited more rigorously: where prose is confused thought tends to be too (though it would be unfair to rebuke Leader for lacking the rare potency of Freud’s brilliant literary style).

Leader contends that our society is impoverished by a dearth of mourning rites. This deserves pondering. But I was most excited by his claim that the arts are “a vital tool in allowing us to make sense of the losses inevitable in all of our lives”. Freud famously paid tribute to the poets’ superior apprehension of the mercurial psyche. This, however, is where Leader’s book most fails its promise.

Loss, with its attendants love and hate, is the chief begetter of art. Words may not only offer release from loss but help recreate a life – take, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ elegiac Spring and Fall, with its opening line “Margaret, are you grieving?” and its plangent conclusion, “It is the plight man was born for/ It is Margaret you mourn for”, or John Donne’s impassioned lament, “I am rebegot/ Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.”

Leader does offer some telling references – Tennyson’s underrated In Memoriam for one. But more often he prefers examples from the unresonant plots of contemporary film. There’s nothing wrong with cinema as an art form, but in a book about the remedial power of words it seems a waste – and gives the uneasy sense that this book is trying too hard to be contemporary.

It is not Leader’s fault his publisher heralds this book “ground-breaking”. It is not. To brood on grief, mourning and melancholy is a human occupation as old and venerable as the hills.

Salley Vickers is author of ‘Where Three Roads Meet’ (Canongate)