Experience of Past’s Cessation and Vital Pulses of the Subject. A Phenomenological Approach to the Psychoanalysis of Melancholic Depression

Abstract

The author reads Sigmund Freud’s text on Mourning and Melancholy on the basis of a phenomenology of time’s consciousness, concretely recurring to Edmund Husserl’s hypothesis on a possible cessation of the retentional continuum. A distance from the past constitutes the condition for renovation of life’s pulses, but unconsciously the melancholic can’t veer away from another, who has died or doesn’t belong more to life’s circle of the depressed subject. The symptoms of the melancholic reveal a destructive, paradoxical process of objectivating another person and becoming object for that person. This process leads to stagnancy of the consciousness temporal flow.