Individual Presentations - Essay Example

Textual Analysis Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, and Dorothea Lasky have written three different articles that provide an analysis of melancholia from almost similar perspectives. However, the works of Julia Kristeva and Dorothea Lasky borrow heavily from Sigmund Freud’s work in their effort to explain the concept of melancholia and other related concepts. Although the perspectives taken by these writers are different, they come up with a conclusion of what melancholia is in a scholarly way. Freud’s approach in understanding melancholia is from a comparative perspective.

Freud makes a comparison between melancholia and mourning to make it easy to understand this concept (Freud, 245). According to Freud, Melancholia is a condition that is closely related to problems with a person’s ego that leads to the onset of the underlying symptoms and indicating signs of the condition. The theoretical framework that Kristeva takes to explain melancholia heavily borrows from the works of Nerval and Dostoevsky. However, the author explains melancholia through symbolism and imagery from an artistic perspective by clearly articulating that melancholia has some aspects of aggressiveness towards the lost object.

Through symbolism that is expressed in an artistic ways people suffering from melancholia are able to express their sorrows, suffering in manner that makes them feel like fleeing away from the lost object or the conditions that bring about melancholia (Freud, 245). It should be clear Kristeva also borrows heavily from Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia. Lasky provides a conceptualization and understanding of melancholia through the use of a poetic approach. Lasky uses a poem to make it apparent that melancholia leads to sadness, which eventually makes someone want to escape this condition through suicide and death.

It reveals features of melancholy throughout and shows how this melancholia reveals itself in art and how it expresses itself as a desire to destroy oneself through death or suicide. For instance, a person suffering melancholia laments if there are vermin underneath the earth/ who are waiting for him join them. Work CitedFreud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Mourning and Melancholia. London: the Hogarth Press, 1916.