Melancholic psychosis—a Lacanian approach

Abstract

Drawing on the conceptual resources provided by Lacanian accounts of melancholia and the death drive, and by means of reference to a clinical case summary and the film Into the Wild, this paper hopes to open up new ways of thinking about melancholic psychosis. The paper foregrounds a series of clinical themes that may be grouped under the rubric of “problems in symbolic fixit”: difficulties in receiving gifts, inability to mediate relations of intimacy, yearning for anonymity/disappearance, and the condition of the twilight world. These themes, while not obviously associated with Freud’s account of melancholia, represent areas of diagnostic priority for a Lacanian approach attuned to the role of symbolic processes and the traumatic “real” object.