Julia Kristeva examines melancholia across art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, and psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart. Kristeva analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the...