This book is about the slow violence of poverty. Lou-Marie Kruger's clinical and research encounters in the Dwarsrivier Valley attempt to give an account of the complex realities and lived experiences of low-income mothers in post-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on maternal life in a semi-rural community, the work can be regarded as a South African case study, showing how particular happenings, specific events, unique interactions and larger societal processes become intertwined to result in complex narratives. Such intricate narratives do not only show how the past always impacts on the present, but can also implicitly suggest how and why such stories are prone to be repeated. While the book can be seen as a study of a place and a community, the lives of individual people and how they are embedded in the larger matrix of culture, history and the political economy are also present. The pertinent question here is one asked by medical anthropologist Paul Farmer: by which mechanisms precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism to gender become embodied as individual experience?

When I was younger, I wished I had been born in a concentration camp like my mother, instead of in boring Englewood Hospital. I used to imagine all the prisoners crying mutely with joy while my grandmother lay swallowing her screams so the guards wouldn’t hear. So writes Deborah Gelb, the teenage daughter of the title character, in her opening chapter. Deborah’s voice is complemented by that of Ruth Mondschein – Clara’s mother, who recounts her life story to Tommy, a patient at the AIDS hospice where she volunteers. In alternating chapters, Deborah and Mrs Mondschein depict the lives of three generations of women as both daughter and mother attempt to make sense of Clara’s 'melancholia' and the historical events that profoundly affected them all. While the novel is set in mid-1990s New York and suburban New Jersey, Deborah and Mrs Mondschein’s stories move through much of the twentieth century, from Vienna and Czechoslovakia, to Spain and Morocco. At the heart of this ambitious novel is the question of why some people are strengthened by adversity – even something as horrific as genocide – and others are defeated by it. Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia examines with bravado and sensitivity how the lingering effects of one of history’s darkest hours – including guilt, anger, loyalty and hope – live on in a single family.

It is not by coincidence that the key figures in the psychology of religion - William James, Rudolf Otto, Carl Jung, and Erik Erikson - each fought a lifelong battle with melancholia, argues Donald Capps in this engrossing book. These four men experienced similar traumas in early childhood: each perceived a loss of mother's unconditional love. In the deep melancholy that resulted, they turned to religion. Capps contends that the main impetus for men to become religious lies in such melancholia, and that these four authors were typical, although their losses were especially severe because of complicating personal circumstances. Offering a new way of viewing the major classics in the psychology of religion, Capps explores the psychological origins of these authors' own religious visions through a sensitive examination of their writings.

This small volume comprises primarily papers presented in 2001 at the 32nd Annual Margaret S. Mahler Symposium on Child Development in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mourning and the importance of the capacity to bear some helplessness, while still finding pleasure in life, are central to this tightly organized volume. The multi-faceted processes involved in mourning and adaptation are addressed. Expectably, Mahler's conceptual contributions are liberally referenced throughout the volume - separation individuation, libidinal object constancy, the unavoidable losses of developmental changes, and mourning of the loss of one-ness. In keeping with the design of the symposium, the book is organized around four primary chapters (presentations), each followed by a discussion chapter. The unifying theme is mourning of the loss of a primary object, either early in life or in adulthood.

Mindful of the tunnel vision sometimes created by the privileging of ‘hybridity talk’ and matters of culture in discussions of texts by minority writers, Delphine Munos in After Melancholia reads the work of the Bengali-American celebrity author Jhumpa Lahiri against the grain, by shifting the ground of analysis from the cultural to the literary. With the help of psychoanalytic theories ranging from Sigmund Freud through André Green and Nicolas Abraham to Jean Laplanche, this study re-evaluates the complexity of Lahiri’s craft and offers major insights into the author’s representation of second-generation diasporic subjectivity – an angle hitherto neglected by critics working from the narrower theoretical boundaries of transnationalism, diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian-American studies alike. Via interdisciplinary incursions into the domains of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, as well as into those of trauma and diaspora studies, Munos takes up “Hema and Kaushik,” the triptych of short stories included in Unaccustomed Earth (2008), as exemplary texts in which Lahiri redefines notions of belonging and arrival regarding the Bengali-American second generation, not in terms of cultural assimilation – which would hardly make sense for characters born in the USA in the first place – but in terms of a resymbolization of the gaps in the parents’ migrant narratives. Munos’ in-depth reading of Lahiri’s trilogy is concerned with exploring how “Hema and Kaushik” signifies on the absent presences haunting transgenerational relationships within the US diasporic family of Bengali descent. Bringing to the forefront such ‘negative’ categories as the gap, the absent, the unsaid, the melancholically absented mother, After Melancholia reveals that the second-generation ‘Mother Diaspora’ is no less haunting than her first-generation counterpart, ‘Mother India’. Calling for a re-assessment of Lahiri’s work in terms of a dialectical relationship between (transgenerational) mourning and melancholia, Munos provides a compelling reading grid by means of which underrepresented aspects of the rest of Lahiri’s work, especially her novel The Namesake (2003), gain new visibility. Delphine Munos is a F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Literatures at the University of Liège (Belgium). She has published in the field of American and postcolonial literature, diaspora studies, and South Asian studies.

An original, authoritative guide to the impact of grief on the brain, the heart, and the body of the bereaved Grief happens to everyone. Universal and enveloping, grief cannot be ignored or denied. This original new book by psychologist Dorothy P. Holinger uses humanistic and physiological approaches to describe grief’s impact on the bereaved. Taking examples from literature, music, poetry, paleoarchaeology, personal experience, memoirs, and patient narratives, Holinger describes what happens in the brain, the heart, and the body of the bereaved. Readers will learn what grief is like after a loved one dies: how language and clarity of thought become elusive, why life feels empty, why grief surges and ebbs so persistently, and why the bereaved cry. Resting on a scientific foundation, this literary book shows the bereaved how to move through the grieving process and how understanding grief in deeper, more multidimensional ways can help quell this sorrow and allow life to be lived again with joy. Visit the author's companion website for The Anatomy of Grief: dorothypholinger.com

Julia Kristeva's blend of the literary with the psychoanalytic places her work central to current thinking, from semiotics and critical theory to feminism and psychoanalysis. Her profound understanding of the dynamics of intention and creativity mark her out as one of the leading theoreticians of desire. Each essay in this volume offers new insight into the many aspects that make up Kristeva's thought, ranging from her analyses of sexual difference, female temporality and the perceptions of the body to the mental states of abjection and melancholia, and their representation in painting and literature.

In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.

These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and 'civilized' modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores institutions of tribal life, tracing analogies between the rites of hunter-gatherers and the obsessions of urban-dwellers, while Mourning and Melancholia sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide. And Freud's extraordinary letter to Einstein, Why War? - rejecting what he saw as the physicist's naïve pacifism - sums up his unsparing view of history in a few profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive pages.

The pantheon of renowned melancholics—from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin—includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to women's grief. Through penetrating readings of texts from Aristotle to Kristeva, she illuminates the complex history of the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature. The pantheon of renowned melancholics—from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin—includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to women's grief. Through penetrating readings of texts from Aristotle to Kristeva, she illuminates the complex history of the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature. Schiesari first considers the development of the concept of melancholia in the writings of Freud and then surveys recent responses by such theorists as Luce Irigaray, KaJa Silverman, and Julia Kristeva. Schiesari provides fresh interpretations of works by Aristotle, Hildegard of Bingen, and Ficino and she considers women's poetry of the Italian Renaissance, key works by Tasso and Shakespeare, and the writings of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Lacan. According to Schiesari, male melancholia was celebrated during the Renaissance as a sign of inspired genius, at the same time as public rituals of mourning led by women were suppressed. The Gendering of Melancholia will be stimulating reading for scholars and students in the fields of feminist criticism, psychoanalytic and literary theory, and Renaissance studies, and for anyone interested in Western cultural history.