Without the images, we have only depression describing itself in the language of clinical psychology with taxonomies of “reactive,” “neurotic,” “endogenous,” “paranoid,” “delusional,” “bi-polar,” etc., degrees and kinds of depression. “Depression is the absence of the mirth reflex,” says one definition; “general retardation of all bodily and psychic functions,” says another; “mourning for a lost object,” says a third.
Ideas of melancholy in medieval times instead offered images. Acedia, for example. This affliction descended particularly on monks who lay abed and could not bake bread or toil in the vineyards, would not rise for prayers, and were prey to the aridity of spirit. Acedia was imaged by a dog, a pig, and a goat. The thin, curled dog in Dürer’s Melencolia I refers back to that dog of acedia.
So any of us curled on our beds in despairing introspection, chasing our own tails, or tails cringing with shame, sucked dry by the fleas and lice of persistently biting scruples could feel the presence of the image and could sympathize with the mood by means of an image apart from the effects of the mood. Images give focus, distance—even a glimmer of impersonal objectivity.
Anyone who has lived in a household with a depressed member can feel the presence of the pig that demands so much space, takes so much into her or his self, that oppressive weight that seems to fill all the rooms, as well as the disorder, even decline into filth.
— Depression, or Melancholy Without the Gods, On Melancholy & Depression, UE 11