from scratch pad

Like Freud's "mourning and melancholia" to which they are indebted, Society without hte Father and The Inability to Mourn participate in a masculinist discourse of melancholy and mourning historically rooted in teh universalist poetic and philosophic traditions of European Renaissance humanism. Juliana Schiesari has drawn a detailed map of the misgynistic gender divisions which have shaped this discourse virtually transhistroically and regardless of the discipline in which they appear. From Ficino to Freud and Lacan, and from humoral medicine, philosophy, and literature to psychoanalysis, melancholy has been gendered and valued or disparaged as follows: First, "when melancholia is considered undesirable it is stereotypuically metaphorized as feminine or viewed as an affliction women bring onto men." (ftnt there). Second, female depression and grieving are "seen as the 'everyday' plight of the common (wo)man,... quotidian event(s) whose collective force does not seem to bear the same weight of 'seriousness' as a man's greif" - or the same need for special comment (ftnt 9). Third, when melancholy IS culturally valued, as it is with individual men of great accomplishment, it is deemed superior to mourning, a traditionally feminine ritual function that has been privatized and repressed. A final characteristic derives especially from Freud and his efforts to differentiate melancholia from conditions that are stereotypically feminine. (...)Schies. explains "A criterion of differentation (for Freud) is found in the NARCISSISTIC identiifcation said to be carried out by melancholia. This narcissistic basis for differentation is consonant with an implicit masculinizing of the neurosis," particularly in its culturally validated form (ftnt 10). Narcissism is gendered masculine here, because, "following Freud's logic, narcissitic identiifcation would be effected by the child through its identity with an ego ideal, whose paradigmatic case is that of the boy identifying with the father"; (ftnt 11) that is, Schiesari, unlike the Mitscherlichs, reads Freud's emphasis to be on secondary rather than primary narcissism.

VERY INTERESTING - THIS WAS FROM P. 4 and 5 of Feminism, film, fascism: women's auto/biographical film in postwar Germany (Linville).

p. 6 0 In the essay on melanchoy and mourning, Freud: "We see how in (the melancholic subject) one part of the ego sets itself over against hte other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object.... What we are here becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly called 'conscience' (ftnt 18 i think) That is, Freud sees in the melancholic a strong identification with the father - in Lacanian terms, the law. Schiesari glosses Freud's account of the object which the paternal voice criticizes as folows: "My feminist suspicion is that this object, at once vilified, desired, and judged by a 'superior, moral' instance, is situated IN THE SAME WAY as woman in classic phallocentrism (that is, as a devalued object, as abject and at fault)" (Schiesari's emphaiss) a suspiciosn she proceeds to confirm.(ftnt 19) (...) Mitscherlichs and Hitler not as introjected father figure - but variant on "pre-oedipal, phallic mother"

(p. 8 - I just think the phenomenon, if rightly assessed would be interesting) "Schneider explains, "If the generation of the fathers had manicly defended against sorrows, melancholy, depression, and all the emotional problems which went along with it, the present generation is made up of little else." (ftnt 24)