what is melancholia and why is it crucial to understanding Scorseses films?
In his seminal study, Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud writes, ‘the distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’ (Freud cited in Nicholls, p 3). Using Freud as a point of departure, Nicholls elaborates a theory of male melancholia, with reference to the work of Juliana Schiesari, Julia Kristeva, and Pam Cook. He outlines five key attributes displayed the male melancholic. First, he experiences ‘a sense of separateness from a corrupt and conservative group’; second, he ‘undergoes a trauma of loss’; third, he refuses to stop mourning his loss, and as a consequence constructs a fantasy scenario and fetishises his loss; fourth, he exhibits a desire to ultimately conform with th
