Name: Marcela Cristina dos Santos
Type: MSc dissertation
Publication date: 30/09/2020
Advisor:

Name	Role
Cláudia Pereira do Carmo Murta	Advisor *

Examining board:

Name	Role
Cláudia Pereira do Carmo Murta	Advisor *
DANIEL OMAR PEREZ	External Examiner *
Jorge Augusto da Silva Santos	Internal Examiner *

Summary: Melancholy has been discusses in countless ways throughout history, often getting different names, which points to an attempt to differentiate it conceptually. Our proposal is to investigate melancholy over time, making it possible to have a historical and philosophical analysis of the notion of health and illness. Parallel to this, we try to understand how Freud’s definition of melancholy establishes a connection with the three main traditions of thought – Hippocratic thinking; thought contained in Problem XXX and Galenic-Hippocratic-Platonic medical thinking – so that it is possible to realize that Freud’s notion of melancholy is to keep these medical and philosophical currents while breaking with them at the same time. Bearing in mind the importance of psychological suffering in Freud’s theory, our reflection turns to ancient Greece in an attempt to understand how Freudian theory became the heir of a philosophical tradition
of the passions of the soul that allows the realization of illness as an unfolding of
emotions, that is why the research begins with Homeric poems and extends to
contemporary times, allowing us to observe how different ways of explaining and
understanding melancholy happens throughout paradigmatic changes.

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