hat Freud would suggest is a manifestation of Scrooge's self-hatred and that Jung would argue might be an actual glimpse of what it to come. When he awakes, it is Christmas morning, and the patient is a changed man:
Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them . . . and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed; and that was quite enough for him (Dickens, 90).
For the Freudian, Scrooge is clearly suffering from melancholia:
a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feeling to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment (Freud, 125).
His dejection is evident in the dark and cold with which he surrounds himself, both at work and especially at home, "a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building" (Dickens, 14). Although he reads all the newspapers, Scrooge very distinctly states, "I wish to be left alone" (11) and scarcely sees the streets he passes through or the people around him except as obstacles in his miserable way. He shows no ability to love anyone (even himself) and has remained unmarried; Belle, his former fiancTe, breaks off with him: "I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you" (39). He is not totally inactive, but does as little as possible in order to get through the day. He speaks very little at first, though we get some sense of the self-loathing with which he sees himself: his nephew implores him not to be cross, to which he replies, "What else can I be . . . when I live in such a world of fools as this? . . . Keep Christmas ...