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.