Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia

Kristeva's study of depression and melancholia as the most archaic expression of a narcissistic wound that can be neither named nor symbolised. The melancholic remains bound to the lost maternal 'Thing' and cannot complete the separation, a symbolic matricide, through which loss becomes signs. Drawing on Freud, on Klein's depressive position and on her own clinical cases, she reads Holbein's Dead Christ, Nerval, Dostoevsky and Duras as ways in which art and language give form to sorrow. Leon S. Roudiez translated it into English as Black Sun (1989), and Keren Shemesh into Hebrew (Resling, 2006).