Melancholia in Thomas!Mann's 'Unordnung und Fruhes Leid':: Feeling envy for the young and dancing

This paper outlines what is believed to be a new psychoanalytic interpretation of Thomas Mann's Unordnung und fruhes Leid. It brings a specific psychoanalytic theory of melancholia to the story which goes beyond received Freudian ideas in, German literary studies. Melanie Klein's work on. unconscious phantasy and her analysis of young children suggest that envy and murderous rage are at the root of melancholia and prevent the individual from mourning the lost love object. The first lost object in Klein's theory is the mother's breast. The baby envies the plentiful and nurturing breast and attacks it in his or her mind when it is withdrawn, with the consequence that he or she fears the retaliation of the attacked object. It is this far of being annihilated in return for hateful feelings and phantasies of destroying the good object that keeps the self in a permanent internal dependence on that object. The individual lives with a grievance which s/he cannot give up. The person cannot mourn what was lost or never there enough; he hates it too much and is contemptuous of it. The figure of Cornelius in Thomas Mann's narrative has all the features of such a person with a grievance. His little daughter's pain is but a reflection of his own unmastered experience of rejection. His adolescent children represent a threat to his identity and symbolize the cause of his unacknowledged envy and aggression that prefer death to life.