The Victory of Depression
Why is it that the psychoanalytic clinic refuses to oblige with popular psychology in presuming that there exists a clinical structure by the name of depression? First, it is because “depression” means different things to different people. We risk losing the singularity of the symptom by attempting a one size fits all model of the symptom. But the symptom is what is most singular, most unique, about an individual — it is the individual’s truth. Second, “depression” occurs most often today as a self-diagnosis: we diagnose ourselves as depressed and then seek, through that label, some paradoxical comfort. This was what Freud meant when he discussed the “benefit from illness.” In identifying with our own victimization we hope that we might get some power out of it. Indeed, the pervasiveness of self-diagnoses means that there is also a demand that our clinicians recognize us as “depressed.”
But we should refuse this demand.
What we discover is that “depression” for some people is a mode of shutting off the ‘too muchness’ of stimulation. To stay in bed, to sleep all day, to hide from people, to sever the social link is the subject’s attempt to cure himself from problems existing in his social environment. These are problems of over-proximity, of the contemporary injunction to enjoy ourselves, and so on. However, in other cases, depression is described by analysands as if it were itself a ‘too muchness’ of anxiety: in this case, depression is another name for anxiety, and it affords the subject access to some mystical zone of surplus enjoyment.
In a third case, we are also told stories of clinical moments when depression represents for the analysand a moment of triumph against the Other. Depression, I was told by several prominent analysts, is a moment of victory — it is the price we pay and are finally willing to accept for the loss of the master signifier. Depression is a period of mourning that loss. In still other cases, depression is not a moment of victory but is rather something closer to a general melancholia whereby loss itself is loss, lack itself is lacking. The trick for the depressed person is simply to find a space of lack, a space of desire.
The clinician, like the theorist, must refuse a one sized fits all definition of any concept. This was Lacan’s achievement in the last part of his teaching: to find always a few modalities, a topological or knot theoretical approach to understanding the world. It was his final offering — it was, finally, a moment beyond Hegel’s achievement of having discovered dialectics. Because if there is one thing we can be certain of (for the psychotic), it is that the dialectic often stalls. At this point something else must be invented to keep the movement going. Jacques-Alain Miller named this the ‘compensatory make-believe function.’ It is a ‘substituted substitute.’
