Hook, Derek2018-09-052018Derek Hook (2018) Melancholic Psychosis—A Lacanian Approach, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 28:4, 466-480, DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2018.1482154.1048-1885 (print)194010.1080/10481885.2018.1482154http://hdl.handle.net/2263/66452Drawing 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.en© Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an electronic version of an article published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 466-480, 2018. doi : 10.1080/10481885.2018.1482154. Psychoanalytic Dialogues is available online at : https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsd20.Death-driveLacanian approachMelancholiaPsychosisObjectSymbolic fixityPostprint Article