The Scream

 

Original title: "The Scream of Nature"

Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” is a portrait of his own anxiety disorder. He describes the experience it represents:

I was walking along the road with two 

friends – then the sun went down 

Suddenly the sky turned blood-red 

– and I felt 

a breath of melancholy 

– an exhausting pain 

under my heart – I paused, leaning against the fence, tired to death – above the blue-black fjord and city there was blood ‹in› tongues of fire 

My friends went on and I stood

there trembling

with anxiety –

and I felt that a great infinite scream went through nature

(Diary, 22 January, 1892)

It is not Munch screaming, not the distressed face in the picture. It is the cosmos around him, the very sky, that is screaming.

This is how real depressive anxiety feels. The real “disorder” is not in the individual soul, but in their environment.