Death in Venice: The Aesthetic Object as Dream Guide

Mental depression is an essentially human response “to frustration and misery,” a response brought about by personal as well as social forces. The most extreme form a mental depression can take, of course, is suicide. While it would seem that the personal element is always present in the act of suicide, the social determinants of this reaction, such as the effects of rapid social change are also relevant. Suicide as a characteristic reaction to the disruption of traditional customs and beliefs, in this connection has a clinical parallel to the way depressive personalities react to the loss, real or symbolic, of security-providing objects, a loss which can revive traumas associated with earlier losses of ideal states of feeling and such part-objects as the breast.

In literature of the depressive response, of which Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice is a notable example, we often find that the depressive individual had maintained very close ties with his parents as a child, and later continues to maintain close (symbiotic-like) ties with conventional, traditional institutions and the authorities who direct them. During the time the depressive hero is in the ‘passive,’ institutional phase of the ecstatic suicidal process,* he pursues the ideals furthered by these institutions using a key defense such as identification with the prohibitions and ideals of powerful, sustaining institutional authorities. He also shows conscientious application to hard work or whatever he considers to be his duty, aggression turned against the self, and so on.

When the depressive hero's institutional ideals become disappointing or are devalued, he may cast them off during the