Impossible mourning: Lamentations as a text of melancholia
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Abstract
The connecting thread that runs through this thesis is the attempt to read the text of Lamentations as representing a melancholic who suffers from several of its symptoms. The term melancholia is used in a psychoanalytical sense, specifically as it is set out in Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia." The first chapter explores some of the symptoms of the text, previous interpretational treatments, and then offers an interpretation of these symptoms as evidence of melancholia. The second chapter relates Julia Kristeva's theory of melancholia to Lamentations. The third, and final, chapter looks at the much debated issue of the speaking voice(s) in Lamentations and interprets them from the work on melancholia by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, particularly Jacques Derrida's understanding of their work.