The dread of living without anticipation: a case of melancholia

It seems that time functions essentially different in melancholia as compared to classical neuroses. We might even say the experience of time dissapears for the melancholicus. No future is anticipated, no past determines the actually lived distress, despair and guilt. This paper illustrates by means of a case study of a melancholic woman how anticipation is necessary for the subject to be able to live. Without desire for things to come, without a past that is experienced as something that anticipated the subject as it is now, there seems to be no more than an eternal now that stupifies the subject and blurs the distinction between death and living. The absence of the structuring function of time results in the experience of utter loneliness and anxiety and consequently also shows the dramatic impact of an absence of anticipation.