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Feeling Melancholy
Temperament, mental illness, and a philosophy of life
What do we mean when we talk about melancholy?
You hear the word thrown about in different ways, and I personally have described myself as some variety of melancholic on many occasions. It might be helpful then to break down our varying uses of melancholy in everyday language.
To begin, let’s divide our use of the word into three basic categories:
Melancholy Temperament
If you’re a fan of personality types and psychology quizzes, no doubt you’ve come across the Four Temperaments: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic.
The Four Temperaments are an old concept, dating back to classical Greece, when the physician Hippocrates established the idea.
While the notion that each person has a temperament they fit squarely into isn’t quite right, the Four Temperaments are still a useful tool for understanding general traits about individuals.
Most of us probably do align with a single temperament in a lot of major ways, but upon scrutiny, we’ll also discover significant overlap with other temperaments in dozens of smaller ways. Moral of the story: humans are complicated.
