Depression | a psychoanalytic perspective
“The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning.” Sigmund Freud | Mourning and Melancholia
It has become very common for people to speak of and suffer depression. We live in an era that is often typified as one of a modern malaise, an era of ennui. Incredible statistics can be produced to show how many people are swallowing ‘anti-depressants’ in order to get up and get on with their lives.
From the point of view of psychoanalysis, discontent is part of the price we pay for living in a civilised state (1) - “depression is a central affect of modernity” (2). Does this mean that it is simply a matter of ‘pulling yourself together’ and ‘just getting on with your life?’ No, clearly not. But it does mean that depression has something to do with a particular human subject in a set of social relations - it is not simply a matter of the chemicals in your body. This makes it important to come and speak about your depression. It is never going to be enough to swallow any kind of pill.
In psychoanalysis (3), we say that laughter is like anxiety in that neither of them lie: they both indicate something true or real for a subject. Depression, on the other hand, not only attempts to banish laughter, but also serves to conceal, obscure, or evacuate the sense of any anxiety. The first thing that has to be done, then, when you come to consult your analyst, is to talk about what brought on your particular depression. What was the context? What do you associate with the word? How have you come to say it is this, rather than something else? What does it mean to you? The depression must be given the chance to communicate something of your subjectivity to an Other.
The fact that depression is not considered a diagnosis in psychoanalytic work does not mean that psychoanalysts think of it as trivial. Far from it – it is quite clear that serious and sometimes tragic consequences can and do ensue. But there is no kind of depression that is excluded from the psychoanalyst’s consulting room. No matter how serious or debilitating the depression has become, if you are prepared to come along and speak, you will find with your analyst the Other that is both able and willing to listen. Working together in the analytic way will give you the chance to find your own way out. It will remain up to you to decide if you want to take it.
by Janet Low
References
1. Sigmund. Freud Civilisation and its Discontents. Standard Edition, Vol 21.
2. Eric Laurent, “The battle of psychoanalysis against boredom and depression” in Almanac of Psychoanalysis, Vol 2. GIEP, Israel. 2000
3. See for example, Freud’s book Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE Vol 8, and his paper ‘Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety’, SE Vol 20
Updated 15|02|2008
