Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (orig. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. If lovers are atrabilarii, full of black bile, medication to rebalance the humours should help good counsel and reminders of how the world looks to a normal mind will help to deflate the hyperbolic swelling of the lover’s perceptions. 3 Like melancholy, too, love is at once an irresistible force bearing down on its helpless victim, and a disorder susceptible to treatment and cure. The disruption represented by love may be only temporary, but while it has possession of the mind it reduces the lover to a state of mental incapacity: lovers ‘are very slaves, drudges for the time, mad men, fooles, dizards, atrabilarii, beside themselves, and as blinde as beetles’, he comments. He will ignore or override all the normal priorities and preoccupations of the sober mind, disinheriting or murdering his nearest and dearest, wasting vast sums of money, dwelling obsessively on the smallest details of appearance and behaviour. 2 The lover’s perception of external reality is disordered he believes the beloved to be all beauty and perfection, however strong the evidence against this. Frustrated or disappointed desire drives the lover insane (‘Goe to Bedlam for examples’, he remarks in relation to lovers’ despair) but additionally, the state of mind induced by love is one which is in itself in some sense insane. 1 Love in various forms - lust, desire of an unattainable object, jealousy, obsession - is in Burton’s discussion part of the map of mental disorder, both as cause and as symptom.
‘Love’, declares Burton, introducing the longest section of his Anatomy, ‘is a species of melancholy, and a necessary part of this my Treatise’.
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