Depression, Sadness and Authenticity

Hauptman’s paper tells of a Mr. A, who refused exogenous treatment for the depression he felt consequent on the end of a romantic relationship, because such treatment seems to be inauthentic and despicable. It seemed this way because the depression felt like an apt response to the loss of the beloved.

Like Hauptman, I have some sympathy with Mr. A’s position. To medicate away authentic emotional reactions to the trials of living is, it seems to me, to promote a form of self-alienation and radical inauthenticity. Surely only the blandest form of life, which had substituted (a) the virtues of living a truthful and meaningful life informed by those emotions that themselves embody essential information about our self in relation to others for (b) those which aimed at promoting a merely subjective well-being or increasing something like ‘hedonic tone,’ would sanction such a banalizing medicalized approach.

At the same time, it seems to me that the argument that depression is an authentic response to the end of such a relationship is itself highly questionable. To be sure, depression at such a time may be entirely natural and normal, yet this by itself need not speak against its inauthenticity because emotional authenticity can be a hard-won psychological achievement.

I shall explain what I mean by briefly rehearsing some traditional psychoanalytical theory regarding depression and sadness. There may be other psychological frameworks that could shed a different, or perhaps an even brighter, light on the dialectical possibility I am opening up; my point here is just to demonstrate the existence of such a possibility.

On the standard and well-known psychoanalytic account, depression after a romantic disappointment amounts to a failure of mourning caused by a continuing identification with the lost beloved that serves as a means to avoid disturbing feelings of anger toward him or her (Freud 1917/1984). On this story, depression has not much to do with an authentic registering of loss in sadness and grief per se, regardless of what a modern, reductively inclined, diagnostic manual might like to tell us.

At the end of a relationship—through a death or break-up or relocation or a falling out—I naturally feel sad. My sadness, it could be said, is my lived body’s acknowledgement of the loss of my beloved. My emotional reaction is the form that my understanding takes—it is the wrenching apart and readjustment of that set of living dispositions and expectations that constituted the embodied ground of that relationship. My father has died: it is not at all enough that I understand this with my head. Instead my lived body must come to terms with this again and again when my first reaction on getting a promotion is to call him, only to painfully grasp that I cannot. To mourn well, then, is to submit oneself to the flames felt by the lived body as it accommodates to the new interpersonal situation; my sadness is the most fundamental form that my grasp of this situation takes.

So too with anger: if you wrong me, then it is not enough that I grasp this in thought. Instead, it is in my anger that I fully process the meaning of this to our relationship, which processing is itself of a piece with my lived adjusting of how I am disposed to engage with you, the trust I place in you, the care I show for you, and so on. A typical task of psychotherapy is to increase ‘ego capacity,’ that is, to increase tolerance for the actual feeling of anger that, when felt, can then guide assertive action, without the anger instead getting obliterated and ‘blown off’ through rageful projective acting out, or getting turned against the self with all the well-known depressive consequences of that involution.

So, on the traditional psychoanalytical account, depression becomes an abode in which the preloss relationship with the beloved is maintained in fantasy through an identification. I enmesh myself further with you in my own mind so that I do not lose...