A change in a well-regulated life is perceived by a melancholic as all-engulfing disarray. The more they cling to order, the more readily they lose their footing: a torn-off shirt button is enough to reveal the purposelessness of existence. In the unanimous opinion of psychiatrists, before the appearance of melancholia the majority of melancholics experienced an upsetting of order; this might have taken the form of menopause, involution, menstruation, childbirth, release from an oppressive psychological burden(!), a change in workplace, a family breakup, or moving to a different house (even if the new residence is better in every respect, since, after all, a home is not just a physical space but also an existential arrangement). Melancholics will do their utmost to ward off a change in life: from the outset, they arrange their lives so as to avoid losses. Psychiatrists have observed that the “melancholic type” is brought up from childhood to be performance- and order-oriented, so later on he does everything for himself and does not let others do anything for fear that his non-viability will come to light — though it is likely that the real cause is terror that in the absence of his personal control extending to the minutest detail, a chink may be left in the fabric of existence that will subsequently lead to the disintegration of everything. The terror extends to everything and closes in on itself; the very possibility of terror paralyzes the melancholic. Terror is regarded as inseparable from the world, from which he would like to withdraw definitively. The melancholic strives to overcome every random accident or unexpected development, which is to say that he is willing to conceive of life only as orderliness, yet he is bound to experience that his own personality is the chief obstacle to ultimate orderliness. For if the personality could be set in order existentially, then it would not be a personality but a machine; on the other hand, if the ultimate disorderliness of life were to be recognized, then life would lose its meaning: why bother to sew on a shirt button if the ultimate prospect is disorder? (According to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus did not complete some of his works due to melancholia, rather like the housewife who stopped washing clothes because of the same affliction.) The crack through which a melancholic steps out into nothingness comes into being within order: the compulsion to create order is attended by an intensified loathing, leads to respect for authority, commands adherence to family bonds, holds moral order in respect, implies a great demand for performance and for giving up striving for the impossible. (How much more docile today’s melancholic has become compared with one from the Romantic era!) Hidden behind all this lies an unacknowledged dread: the melancholic, as was shown by Franz Kafka, does not respect authority because he fears it, but because if he did not respect it then existence itself would become meaningless. Boundaries would cease to exist, and the alienation that he most fears would irrupt into his life. In this case, respect for authority is a flight from nothingness, from horror. Only melancholics feel true respect for authority: they will sincerely bend the knee to someone they may just as sincerely hold in contempt. And the same goes for the avoidance of conflicts, family, articles of faith, etc.: the seemingly mutually exclusive traits of perspicacity and resignation, sensitivity and willingness to compromise, merge in them, only to degenerate in the end into “incomprehensible” suicide, “mere” change, or “unwarranted” sorrow. In point of fact, the melancholic is characterized by a simultaneous love of freedom and terror of freedom: he does not feel free in his actions, because order binds him hand and foot, yet he does not dare strive for freedom — for unequivocal self-realization, fearless confrontation with mortality. A melancholic patient declared to her physician: “I have always looked for order, it is gratifying to me. It protects against disorder, uncontrolled behavior, anarchy, and against sin.” The patient then meant to say, “Satan is the representative of disorder in the soul,” but making a slip of the tongue said instead: “Satan is the representative of order in the soul” (quoted in Tellenbach, Melancholy, 209).
The melancholic fears order just as much as disorder; his fear and the attendant sorrow show that he has failed to find solace in order. Try as he might to achieve order, it nonetheless elicits from him the most profound unease: order is much too arranged; there is no place in it for the “indigestible,” “inexpressible” character traits that utterly upset this order. The melancholic creates order but realizes that he has no place in it. And since he wishes to tidy up the whole world, he is forced to realize that his own person can appear in it only as a permanent deficiency, a great misunderstanding. But he is unable to regard deficiency as a normal condition, and in order not to be “alone” in his suffering, he makes deficiency the innermost essence of existence: his life is a misunderstanding, like existence itself. A state of anxiety characteristic of melancholia (melancholia anxiosa) is a fear of deficiency: but since the melancholic finds this not outside but in the very world of which it is the inner essence, the fear relates not only to deficiency, to nothingness, but to something as well. This paradox is painful for him, and consequently he experiences the world anew in an unprecedented manner: as a pile of ill-matched fragments that render the deficiency palpable. Although he lives in the world, he also moves along beside it, as it were, which is why the world gives the impression of being an external object, totally alien to the self. He is part of the world, but at the same time totally alien to it: left to his own devices, feeling homeless and expelled from everywhere, having no idea what purpose could be served by his unappeasable desire.
The desolation and terror that overwhelm the melancholic cannot be reduced to dejection or fear as they are commonly understood. He is sorrowful, but he also has an outlook on his sadness: he is well aware of the futility, the “‘senselessness” of grieving, and he relates to his sadness as to an object. He is sad, but also has nothing to do with his own condition, so he cannot be comforted either. He has sunk so deeply into gloom that he is capable even of being cheerful. The ancients discovered an intimate relationship between melancholia and mania, which has remained valid down to the present day. An eighteenth-century comic by the name of Carlini was a severe melancholic, and Byron, too, was melancholic, though his depression did not hinder him from being the center of any company. And Keats wrote in his “Ode on Melancholy”: