Depression
– The Static Protest
Crucial to psychic functioning are
feelings of vitality. Psychiatric disorders occur when these feeling are
impaired.
Winnicott referred to traumatic
neurosis as the break in the lifeline. What is
broken, shattered is the experience of life, the construction of
vitality. Psychic trauma is an event in which
the individual is threatened with death
or destruction of a part of the body including the mind and soul. All mental
disturbances are thought to occur from these events that then lead to a
numbing, constriction or dissociation of feelings to diminish psychic tension. The dissociated material is split-off,
abandoned.
If the person resists feelings, then they can say “If I feel nothing,
then death and its equivalents do not exist for me, or can at least be fended
off through psychic numbing. Emotional numbing and overall constriction is
similar to death. Many survivors in Hiroshima underwent an extreme form of
numbing, of symbolic death to avoid a
permanent physical or psychic death. Another example was the walking-corpse of
the death camps. The divine spark within them is dead, already too empty to
suffer.
Depression creates a static apprehension and negation of
those feelings of separation and disintegration.
Freud described melancholia as a
culture of the death instinct. It often succeeds in driving the ego into death
if the tyrant super-ego doesn’t get to it first. Every neurotic state of
depression contains a tendency to deny life. People become depressed following
disappointments in love because “with their lost love, they lose their very existence if one attempts to
love again.” Narcissistic gratification develops
from these repeated loses rather than
explore any further ramifications of the sense
of losing one’s very existence. Freud’s classical study of Mourning and
Melancholia was written in 1915, on
Narcissism written in 1914 explore the association of depression with the development
of narcissism. Freud thought that the lost-object becomes incorporated into the
ego so an object loss becomes an
ego-loss.
One acts depressed to avoid the feelings of helplessness and
hopelessness. One behaves statically to avoid experiencing the full actuality
of one’s stasis. This numbing towards one’s numbing again closely resembles
patterns in survivors of the Holocaust.
The depressed person's psychic energy is
locked in, insistent negativism. Hence the major element of his entrapment. It
is as if they have the impulse to act, but
something shuts them down and prohibits them from taking action (Will-power).
There then becomes a vicious circle around energy
impairment: diminished psychic energy towards the outside, a negativistic
assertion of the unavailability of vital energy to do something and hence a
retreat backs into static negativism.
No comments:
Post a Comment