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The psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun, who has written a number of analytic works, presents a serious and profound examination of the melancholic structure, which is fundamentally relevant to the secret of ontological structure. Inherent in the book is therefore a question that confronts every psychoanalyst, as the author points out in quoting Thomas Mann's statement that psychoanalysis is a melancholic mode of knowledge. This question necessarily includes the passage through death, and it sustains the book at each of its intersections.
The author adopts a rigorously clinical approach, with references to Karl Abraham, Freud and Lacan; each successive example delves deeper into the very core of the malady of melancholia, which is exposed as downfall, obscenity, apathy, inertia, self-aversion, passive resistance, rottenness, diminution, unworthiness and a lust born of humiliation, all of which are expressions of the melancholic's cruelty to himself and others.
For Jacques Hassoun, the core of melancholia is the murder of the Thing, defined as ‘the primordial object that is lost for ever, yet in a way never entirely lost, because the subject will always be concerned to find it again’. Considered in these terms, the symbolic may be seen as murder of the Thing. The author thus constructs a theory of melancholia based on the relation to the object, taking account of the missing lost Thing, which is never lost, which is to be lost—in other words, of the impossibility of mourning. Hence the melancholic is ‘at all times under the yoke of a necessity, namely the murder of what strikes at the very heart of his subjectivity, the slow murder of those he loves’, after which he encounters the inner desert and feels that the obvious course is suicide. Emergence from melancholia through psychoanalysis entails a position in which the Thing that has escaped is commuted into murder. The same passage also has to be negotiated by any psychic organisation that is called upon to accept the pro