Mania is a state of psychomotor excitation. Its onset most often comes through inversion of a melancholic mood, either spontaneously or owing to treatment for depression.
The manic mood is euphoric, changeable, and accompanied by emotional hyperesthesia. The subject exhibits pathological optimism with an overestimation of the self and unrealistic plans that sometimes lead to delusions along megalomaniacal lines (grandeur, omnipotence, messianism). The expansiveness of mania is associated with agitation, expressed in hyperactivity and hypermimia. It is also accompanied by tachypsychia ("rushing thoughts"), an acceleration of the thought processes externally manifested in logorrhea, graphorrhea, hypermnesia, and distractibility. Hypersyntony, a immediate and increased receptivity to stimuli from the outside world and a loss of the ability to discriminate between important facts and details, gives the impression that the subject is closely emotionally attuned with his or her surroundings. Reduction in the duration of sleep, sometimes to the point of total insomnia, is a constant clinical sign.
In "Mourning and Melancholia" (1916-17g [1915]), based on his impressions as an analyst, Sigmund Freud observed that melancholic and manic patients were "wrestling with the same 'complex"' (p. 254)—a complex to which the melancholic ego succumbs and over which the manic ego triumphs. From nonpathological states of jubilation, triumph, and joy, he extrapolated the economic precondition of mania: It corresponded to a fresh availability of the psychic energy expended in the unconscious work of melancholia, which in mania again becomes "available for numerous applications and possibilities of discharge" (p. 254). At the point where melancholia turns into mania, the subject's ego is liberated from the object of its suffering; it surmounts its loss and triumphs over the object, and consequently the psychic energy that has been counter-cathected and bound to mental pain is suddenly available. In mourning there is no liberation of this type, for detachment from the object is more gradual, although Karl Abraham (1924/1927) viewed the increase in libidinous desires in some bereaved persons as comparable to mania.
From a topographical viewpoint, Freud showed in "Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego" (1921c), that whereas a severe ego ideal crushes the melancholic's ego with its rigorous control, during mania it is suddenly absorbed or merged into the ego. The ego and the ego ideal of the manic subject become one, thus freeing the subject from all hindrances and all criticism, procuring for the subject a feeling of triumph and boundless satisfaction.
For Abraham, "the manic patient has thrown off the yoke of his super-ego, which now no longer takes up a critical attitude towards the ego, but has become merged in it" (1924/1927, p. 471). Abraham compared mania to a cannibalistic orgy. The manic subject, he argued, manifests an "increase in . . . oral desires" (p. 472) a veritable object-bulimia. This accelerated incorporation of the object is immediately followed by an "equally pleasurable act of ejecting [introjected objects] almost as soon as they have been received" (p. 472). The subject's "psychosexual metabolism" (p. 472) thus appears to be significantly accelerated.
Bibliography
Abraham, Karl. (1927). Notes on the psycho-analytical investigation and treatment of manic-depressive insanity and allied conditions. In Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M.D. (pp. 137-156). London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. (Original work published 1911) ——. (1927). A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders, In Selectedpapers of Karl Abraham, M.D. (pp. 418-201). London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. (Original work published 1924)
Freud, Sigmund. (1916-17g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia, SE, 14: 237-258.
——. (1921c), Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.
—ALBAN JEANNEAU
