Melancholia and Creativity: A Psychoanalytic Study in Selected Poems of Philip Larkin

Abstract

Melancholia, which is widely known as a “mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest” (Malacos, 2020 , p. 52), has an undeniable negative influence on human society. With many millions of people affected, depression or melancholia is the leading disease of modernity and the invisible force that robes people of their lives. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is credited with helping to beat depression or melancholia through mapping a new way of how the mind works and analyzing depressed peoples’ behaviours using his psychoanalytic theories. Depression, Freud argues, emerges when the brain is overwhelmed by the burden of the unconscious, that is the part of the mind where the ideas related to forbidden wishes and unacceptable thoughts are buried, which means releasing the repressed feelings that burden the unconscious can make depressed people maintain a certain level of recovery. It is undeniable that poetry is at the top of the list when it comes to using writing as a tool of achieving catharsis because of the nature of its poetic language and the multiplicity of interpretations that it bears. Consequently, this study aims to give a psycholiterary insight into the essence of melancholia and shed light on its positive aspect. It also analyzes the theme of melancholia in Philip Larkin’s volume of poems, “The Less Deceived”, according to the psychoanalytic theory.