This research discusses the role of forgiveness within the disease of melancholy, with the broader aim of tracing in it a sort of complex psychological work, alternative to that of mourning, through which it is possible to investigate the potentially combative side of melancholic affliction. The point of departure has been found in Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay, Mourning and Melancholia, a classic text that we picked up with the intention of offering its possible re-actualization. What we wanted to highlight is the uniquely pathological character that Freud has attributed to melancholy, depicted in terms of failure of the work of mourning, a terrible vortex that devitalises life and condemns to death the one who suffers. Starting from this nihilistic scenario, the questions that have been asked to support the subsequent argument (which also constitutes the pars construens) can be expressed as follows: is it possible for the melancholic subject to undertake an alternative work, which gives him a second chance, after the failure of mourning? A plausible way out has been found in the role of forgiveness, an element that psychoanalysis has often preferred to ignore, and which instead is valued here in terms of compensatory work, a reaction to the overall affliction. After a detailed theoretical introduction which has the aim of delimiting and clarifying our field of investigation, in the following chapters the reader is faced with “stories of forgiveness”. These are stories of losses, of abandonments, sometimes even of reconquest, and they all present a constant dialectical tension between the affliction generated by one’s own suffering and the surprise of forgiveness. In other words, it is a literary journey aimed at probing the different ways in which the psychic work of forgiveness is structured, the questions it is able to raise, the way in which it finds its sublimation. This will be a critical account conducted through the tools of philosophy, literary theory, cultural anthropology, with often self-referential implications.

(2019). Del perdono nel sentimento melanconico. Percorsi letterari, filosofici, psicoanalitici [doctoral thesis - tesi di dottorato]. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10446/128617

Del perdono nel sentimento melanconico. Percorsi letterari, filosofici, psicoanalitici

Mossali, Mattia
2019-06-05

Abstract

This research discusses the role of forgiveness within the disease of melancholy, with the broader aim of tracing in it a sort of complex psychological work, alternative to that of mourning, through which it is possible to investigate the potentially combative side of melancholic affliction. The point of departure has been found in Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay, Mourning and Melancholia, a classic text that we picked up with the intention of offering its possible re-actualization. What we wanted to highlight is the uniquely pathological character that Freud has attributed to melancholy, depicted in terms of failure of the work of mourning, a terrible vortex that devitalises life and condemns to death the one who suffers. Starting from this nihilistic scenario, the questions that have been asked to support the subsequent argument (which also constitutes the pars construens) can be expressed as follows: is it possible for the melancholic subject to undertake an alternative work, which gives him a second chance, after the failure of mourning? A plausible way out has been found in the role of forgiveness, an element that psychoanalysis has often preferred to ignore, and which instead is valued here in terms of compensatory work, a reaction to the overall affliction. After a detailed theoretical introduction which has the aim of delimiting and clarifying our field of investigation, in the following chapters the reader is faced with “stories of forgiveness”. These are stories of losses, of abandonments, sometimes even of reconquest, and they all present a constant dialectical tension between the affliction generated by one’s own suffering and the surprise of forgiveness. In other words, it is a literary journey aimed at probing the different ways in which the psychic work of forgiveness is structured, the questions it is able to raise, the way in which it finds its sublimation. This will be a critical account conducted through the tools of philosophy, literary theory, cultural anthropology, with often self-referential implications.
5-giu-2019
31
2017/2018
STUDI UMANISTICI INTERCULTURALI
VIOLI, Alessandra
BOTTIROLI, Giovanni
Mossali, Mattia
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