On female melancholia in migration II: Interpretations from Turkish-Muslim culture with a case vignette

While my first article, “On female melancholia in migration”, considered melancholia from an Islamic, Turkish medical-historical, artistic, and psychoanalytic perspective and presented a case study of a melancholic migrant woman with an eating disorder, this second part initially discusses melancholia from the perspective of intercultural mythology. This is followed by an approach to melancholia in relation to the concept of the death drive and “deobjectification” by André Green. The core of the article consists of scenes from the case vignette of a severely melancholic marriage-migrant woman from Turkey. Death and transience as the pivots of her (un)conscious conflict have surrounded her from within and determine the melody of our psychoanalytic journey. The creative and unconscious processes in the work are traced through her reverie and one of her dreams, whose uncanny and nostalgic glimmer of melancholia gradually enters the psychoanalytic space. A countertransference dream and the analyst's associations are also integrated into the case presentation.