Mention of melancholia creates palpable unease; if psychiatry were to seek to return to the concept its due rights (V. E. von Gebsattel, L. Binswanger, E. Straus, H. Tellenbach), the closed system would be spectacularly thrown wide open. It is no accident that it was first and foremost the so-called Daseinsanalysis school of philosophical anthropologists that attempted to take into account the insoluble problem of melancholia. This approach has a prominent place within dynamic psychiatry as Daseinsanalysis; true to the old notion of melancholia, it does not strive for an instrumental classification of a psychophysiological condition, pegging it like an object, but aims instead at understanding the horizon unfolding within a given condition. A separation of melancholia and depression occurs here, too, but on the basis that depression is describable by its symptoms, while melancholia is at best only interpretable. According to this school of thought, only depression has a symptomatology, whereas melancholia is a peculiar state of being that is not apprehensible as a certain cluster of symptoms — just as no interpretation of being can be entirely set down, spelled out, or treated as an object.4
The Daseinsanalytical approach touched the weak point of mainstream psychiatry, and in doing so — as its critics emphasize — it has laid the groundwork for its own collapse as a closed psychiatric discipline. For if melancholics (or persons suffering from any psychiatric illness) construct for themselves an interpretation of existence that is just as valid and “homely” for them as that of persons who are free from similar conditions, then it becomes questionable whether a sharp boundary can be drawn between illness and health. Usually, a person whose notions do not conform with reality is held to be mentally ill — but that presupposes a view that is not at all typical of the world in modern times: that reality is unified, and its unity is guaranteed by an external power independent of us. For the Middle Ages, the boundary between madness and soundness of mind was obvious: doubt or belief in the divine order—ordo Dei—provided the proof. The evolution of the concept of melancholia in the modern age went hand in hand with the disintegration of the divine order: the closed uniform order and the sense of definitiveness backing up the notion of reality vanished, and the fragmentation, the “terrible dissolution” (Nietzsche) of the modern age altered the notion of reality itself: reality cannot be apprehended as an object. Facts become facts only in relation to humans; reality is not something existing, irrespective of us, to which we relate externally. The word “reality” is metaphorical to begin with. The physical existence of man is no more real than his intellectual existence; indeed, only with major qualifications can one make a distinction between the two. For the scientific mind, which contrasts subject with object, reality is identical with so-called objectivity, the world on the far side of the individual, and it fails to notice that what I perceive of the external world is picked up by my “soul” and “body”; or in other words, my “mental” state (for example, whether I am melancholic, in love, or, perhaps, perverse) is just as much “flesh-and-blood” reality as a stone lying by my foot. Ludwig Klages points out, with good reason, that a physicist who insists that the ultimate criterion of reality is its measurability is the victim of a delusion: his reality is measurable only because he has already filled it with concepts that are alien to reality (Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 711). The common conception is that reality is what starts beyond me; yet anyone who doubts that (and, let us add, is melancholic) will sense that this idea of reality deprives consciousness and, along with it, a person’s entire being of its validity. According to Aristotle, potentiality and actuality are two sides of the same reality: there is no actuality without further inherent possibilities, and there is no potentiality that is not in some way actual. The scientific mentality of the modern era has given up on searching for humanity’s horizons; sensing that such research would open the way to ultimate inscrutability, it has narrowed reality down to a closed factuality. By the nineteenth century, the living cosmos had been disfigured into dead raw material. Paradoxically, the more lifeless and subservient it became, the more elusive and incomprehensible it turned out to be. No wonder — in the meantime, man forgot about his own “reality,” the cosmic nature of his own being, and as a result the ground slipped ever further from under his feet. At least since the emergence of psychoanalysis, we know that so-called neutral reality is a pure fiction, and this was reinforced later by Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, structuralism, and Jean Baudrillard, who has employed the category of the simulacrum to show that in some cases the representation of reality is more real than reality, as a result of which the real is not what is reproducible, but what has already been reproduced.
The ultimate unresolvability of the clinical classification of mental illnesses is a signal that even the most closed so-called actuality is unstable in principle because only a human being, living in uncertainty as he or she must, the Homo insipiens of Ortega y Gasset, can say about something that “this is a fact.” Sooner or later, even facts deemed to be closed will reopen, and then one will be compelled to announce: what we hitherto believed to be fact is fiction, and what hitherto was fiction turns out to be fact. Dynamic psychiatry, and especially the Daseinsanalytical approach, considers this permanent openness to be definitive, and it seeks to understand mental illnesses on this basis: we can witness how philosophy stabs psychiatry in the back. In his own slightly scholastic, slightly fairy-tale-like, yet thought-provoking style, Schelling wrote the following about madness:
What is the human mind? Answer: an existing entity that came into being out of the nonexistent, as intelligence came into being out of an absence of intelligence. So what is the basis of the human mind?. . Answer: an absence of intelligence, and as the human mind relates to the soul, too, as a nonexistent entity, thus at one and the same time it relates as an unintelligent entity. The deepest essence of the human mind, therefore, if one looks at it separate from the soul, and thus from God, is madness. . What is called intelligence, insofar as it is a matter of genuine, living, and active intelligence, is, in point of fact, nothing other than madness hobbled by rules. . Those people in whom there is no madness possess a vacant, unproductive intelligence.
(quoted in Leibbrand, Heilkunde, 455–56)
If one does not interpret the words literally, then one will notice the following truth lying behind it: the human mind is not a divine, unattached substance, and therefore it cannot be studied as an independent object (or consciousness). Madness is not something mysterious that suddenly envelops the mind from an unknown direction, but is a result of the
interaction
, the ultimate identity, of mind and being. (For Schelling, madness was very natural, by no means something fearful to be condemned.) Madness is not an “objective fact,” irrespective of judgment (it does not fall onto one’s head like a flowerpot), but a particular interpretation of existence that, in the end, strikes one as madness (or a sane judgment) in a dynamic, moving, constantly changing net of innumerable interpretations of existence in a given period. Naturally, this does not mean that madness and sanity are relative terms. There is unambiguous insanity as illness, and there is unambiguous sanity as health. Uncertainty of judgment relates, on the one hand, to their relationship, and, on the other hand, to intermediate