5. Tumors of the third cerebral ventricle damage the rear area of the corpus mamillare at the back of the hypothalamus, and can provoke depression; endocrine conditions such as hyperthyroidism, castration, menopause, Addison’s disease, Simmonds’ disease, and poisoning by certain chemicals (carbon monoxide, alcohol, arsenic, mercury) are likewise accompanied by melancholic mental symptoms.
6. Tamás Nyíri (1920–1994) was a Hungarian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and philosopher.
7. Johann Christian August Heinroth, Carl Gustav Carus, and J. G. Langermann — the last, for all that he was a physician, had as an instructor the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and for a while was a teacher of Novalis.
8. According to medieval concepts, they could: one has to think only of Agrippa von Nettesheim’s list.
9. “Suppose that the eye were an animal — sight would have been its soul,” Aristotle writes (On the Soul, 412b), and St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “If, therefore, the soul were not a body, it could not have knowledge of corporeal things” (Summa theologica, 75. q. 1. a. 1).
10. For Homer, the body (
) meant a corpse, whereas the soul (
) meant the soul of a dead person: body and soul could be imagined as a duality only after death. According to Plato, though body and soul could be distinguished, both had their own nature (
), which was akin to the nature of the cosmos: both were nurtured from a shared root. Nor does one hear anything about an incorporeal soul in the New Testament, only about a mind (
): the body is an organism animated by the psyche, and the psyche is individual life itself.
11. See Friedrich Schlegeclass="underline" “Man is a microcosm: the characteristics of the universe are part of the characteristics of the individual” (Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, 18:229).
12. His treatise Nosologia methodica systema morborum of 1763 listed ten major classes of disease, further broken down into numerous orders, 295 genera, and 2,400 individual diseases.
13. Kraepelin was not only a major figure as a classifier but also a passionate botanist. In his old age, he gave up the principle of classification and concerned himself with the “construction” of individual diseases, accepting also the methods of empathy and sympathy.
14. Unlike Griesinger and Wernicke, who put forward strictly somatic explanations, the German neurologist and psychiatrist Karl Kleist was of the opinion as early as 1913 that in investigating mental illness, one ought to adopt the criteria of “empathy” and “unintelligibility.”
15. For example, at the end of the Middle Ages in England, lycanthropy, an illness in which patients believe themselves to be animals (Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible was one such), was considered to be one of the symptoms of melancholia, and hunting licenses were issued to destroy such patients.
16. The verb “to diagnose” refers to communication: diagnosis — the communication (
) of knowledge (
) — presumes a dynamic, dialogic connection between knower and known.
17. Hence the Latin patior (suffer, endure) and passio (intense emotion).
18. Inscribed on the façade of many institutions of pathology is the motto Mortui vivos docent (“The dead teach the living”).
19. It stands to reason that suffering caused by a given illness has to be alleviated: painkillers, however, can do nothing to alter the fundamental law that while there is life, pain will be bound to occur sooner or later.
20. Empedocles put it this way:
For ’tis through Earth that Earth we do behold,
Through Ether, divine Ether luminous,
Through Water, Water, through Fire, devouring Fire,
And Love through Love, and Hate through doleful Hate.
(Fragments, 109)
This is cited approvingly by Aristotle, who himself writes elsewhere: “The organ which perceives colour is not only affected by its object, but also reacts upon it” (
On Dreams
, 460a).
21. This is the basis on which Dilthey contrasts explanatory and descriptive psychology; Jaspers, explanatory (causal) and cognitive psychiatry; the psychosomatic approach, the clinical and structural recognition of diseases. The demand for understanding emerged at the start of the twentieth century in connection with psychological phenomena that were not explicable on the basis of brain pathology.
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1. Erwin Straus considered psychoanalysis to be “anthropological solipsism.”
2. A wealthy Swiss businessman suffered a significant loss of money in his business, though not one large enough to have an appreciable effect on his financial standing. Afterward, he was admitted to the hospital with the symptoms of melancholia, and there his every thought revolved around the lost sum of money. After a while, news came that there had been a mistake: the money had not been lost. Despite the prognostications of the physicians, however, the news did not make him happier; if anything, his depression intensified.
3. A peculiar manifestation of laziness is the inarticulate prattle that can sometimes be observed in melancholics, which Aristotle commented on in the Problemata physica: the mind is slow in following the notions that crop up, it is too “lazy” to articulate clearly. In interpreting the medical symptomatology of depression, Julia Kristeva rightly highlights inhibition of speech and action: their behavioral rhythm has been disrupted, the semblance of the world having a coherent nature has ceased, everything has lost its sense, and depressed patients, immersed in their own pain, perceive acting and speaking, which automatically place actor and speaker in an interdependency, to be equally burdensome.
4. The German romantic Achim von Arnim characterized his close friend Heinrich von Kleist as “extraordinarily singular, slightly eccentric in nature”: “He is the most impartial of men, almost cynical. I have long been acquainted with him; there is something indefinable in his manner of speaking which is akin to stammering and is manifested in the course of his work as continual deletions and alterations. He has an odd way of living; he sometimes stays in bed for days on end so that, while smoking a pipe, he should be able to work without being disturbed” (quoted in Helmut Sembdner, ed., Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren, 347).
5. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol concluded from the frequent onanism of melancholics that this was one of the causative factors (see Thomas Szász, The Myth of Mental Illness, 185); in reality, however, the pressing need that melancholics have for masturbation — suicide on a small scale — is not the cause, but a symptom of a life oriented to death. Joachim Heinrich Campe, in his book Kleine Seelenlehre für Kinder (A short psychology for children, 1780) gives an impassioned warning to children about onanism, threatening that it would make them “dejected and melancholic.”
6. His throat constricts and dries out, his breathing becomes labored, his extremities grow weak, he breaks out in a cold sweat, he is overcome by psychomotor inhibition.
7. The term was formed from the root words 
(“a return home”) and 
(“pain”) by Johannes Hofer in 1688 in his Dissertatio medica de nostalgia oder Heimweh.
8. Nostalgia, like the idea of melancholia, was eliminated from the lexicon of clinical psychiatry in the nineteenth century, only for it to become of interest again to the dynamic psychiatry of Karl Jaspers in the early twentieth century.