Has depression always
been with us? Many would suggest that it has. In the ancient world the Greek
physician Hippocrates wrote that melancholia resulted from too much black bile
in the spleen. However, both our understandings of melancholic conditions, and
above all the prevalence of specific forms of misery, have changed remarkably
since then.
It was Aristotle, or
someone writing in his name, who suggested that it was in the nature of the
most distinguished, creative, even witty men to suffer from melancholy: “Why is
it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry
or the arts are clearly melancholics?” Ever since, others have also claimed
links between melancholy and creativity or merit. Still, many simply wrote of
its inevitability as a part of life, as did Shakespeare in his comedies and
tragedies alike, most of them written around the 1590s: “I hold the world but
as the world … A stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one.”
A few decades later, the
Renaissance scholar Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) quickly
became the most famous English historical text on the topic of melancholy. It
has retained admirers right up to the present, from Samuel Johnson through John
Keats and Samuel Beckett, to Philip Pullman and Nick Cave. Burton wrote his
tome, he said, to keep himself busy in order to avoid melancholy himself. It
seems to have worked, at least up to the time of his death at 63, since he
never stopped writing till the day he died. By this time, he had completed
three volumes and around 1,400 pages, leaving on his deathbed notes for further
revisions.
When Burton began, he
was writing about what he saw as an epidemic of melancholy, a condition so
prevalent that few could be said not to suffer from it at all. His goal was to
encompass every dimension of misery in his work, from the most common to the
most esoteric. Burton’s “melancholy” was therefore a broader concept than the
condition we think of today as depression. He believed it could be understood
and treated medically, but Burton also described the diverse patterns of
melancholy as forms of moral and spiritual disease tied in with the background
misery of his times. His was a period of both political and religious strife
that had continued across Europe after the Protestant Reformation, reaching
England in the early 17th century.
Burton was far from the
only member of the early modern learned community writing about the passions
who saw melancholy as shaped by the anxieties and conflicts of the day, along
with the licentiousness the passions were also seen as generating. As the
historian of emotions Thomas Dixon argues, widespread interest in melancholy
and the approval of tears were present in British history right up to the
middle decades of the 20th century. Indeed, in 1733 the pioneering British
physician Dr. George Cheyne would write about “melancholia” as The English
Malady.
However, the earlier
notions of melancholia as a type of imbalance of the humors, or dark spirits
circulating in the body, shifted with the strong turn to science during the
British Enlightenment in the second part of the 18th century. In particular,
the physician and medical scholar William Cullen, a key figure in the Scottish
Enlightenment and friend of the philosopher David Hume (as well as his
physician), sought to explain all diseases as linked to the physiology of the
nervous system, especially the brain. For Cullen, melancholia was “partial
insanity” and, although he did not depart altogether from the old notion of
“noxious” humors, he did pave the way for the gradual reinterpretation of
melancholy as “depression,” later seen as a neurological or “affective”
disorder.
Thus by the early 19th
century, a strictly medical model of mental illness was emerging. As the
century progressed, sadness, in whatever form, was no longer attached to the
idea of melancholy as a disorder of the intellect, but rather melancholia and
depression were seen as a mood or “affective” disorder, according to the
philosopher of science Clark Lawler.
By the end of the
century, the stage was set for the German psychiatrist Emile Kraepelin to write
what is regarded as the founding text of modern scientific psychiatry. His
Compendium of Psychiatry, first published in 1883, established psychiatry as a
branch of medicine and developed a classification system of mental illness that
rested upon distinguishing “manic depression” (now classified as a variety of
mood disorders) from “dementia praecox,” by which he referred to the rapid
cognitive disintegration associated with the various schizophrenic disorders.
Kraepelin remained influential well into the 20th century, with his
classifications still familiar to us today. He also saw mental illness as
primarily genetic, urging support for eugenics and racial hygiene to enhance
the German people.
Yet, even as
psychiatrists felt they were making sense of what they saw as the largely
innate or endogenous nature of depression, the father of sociology, Émile
Durkheim, undertaking a new discipline of study, was looking in the opposite
direction. He saw much evidence for social determination of the levels of
personal misery that were evident at the close of the 19th century. Most
famously, in his 1897 study Suicide, Durkheim compared the suicide rates of people
belonging to different religious and other social groups, concluding that
suicidal depression was attributable to what he called the levels of “anomie,”
people experiencing conditions where social norms were absent or confusing.
This meant that suicidal depression could not be seen as primarily an
individual phenomenon, since it was distinctive of groups of people rather than
of individual types. For instance, Catholics, Jews and married people were less
prone to commit suicide than were Protestants and the unmarried, while overall
men were more likely to kill themselves than women. Venturing further, Durkheim
claimed that all forms of unhappiness had a social side: “There is a collective
as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness,
making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can
pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual
is incompetent.” As Durkheim saw it, it was the unhappiness produced by the
rise of industry and the factory system undermining traditional societies which
explained the extremes of modern misery.
In the meantime, Freud
and the evolving psychoanalytic tradition believed that depression had a very
personal history, although definitely a relational one. Freud did not dismiss
biological factors, but he emphasized above all the role of grief resulting
from the loss of an important relationship, triggering earlier memories of loss
of, or rejection by, those first objects of love, the parents and especially
the mother.
In one of Freud’s most
influential essays, “Mourning and Melancholia,” published in 1917, he saw
processes of normal mourning (often a period of two or three years) as people
registering their loss of, or rejection by, someone or something they have been
narcissistically invested in, but eventually managing to let go of their
sorrow. However, melancholy or extreme depression occurred when a person could
not move on from their bereavement but had internalized the lost object and,
especially in cases where there had been repressed ambivalence or anger towards
that now absent “presence,” grief and anger could become directed inwards
towards the self, establishing relentless and bitter self-reproach: “In
mourning it is the world radical happiness which has become poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego itself.”
Working in this
tradition, and drawing upon the later work of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein,
Paris-based Julia Kristeva writes vividly in Black Sun (1989) that whether
observing melancholia or depression—seeing the two as blurring into each
other—“Freudian theory detects everywhere the same impossible mourning for the
maternal object.” However, Kristeva also argues that this lasting desire for
the lost mother, the partial refusal to let go of that first maternal
identification, can be a source of great artistic creativity. At least it can
be in men, in her view, visible for instance in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s writing on
suffering and forgiveness. Only the male artist, she believes, can sometimes
manage that move of both detaching himself from his early merger with the
maternal object, while also succeeding in retaining traces of his former
“feminine” identification, making his melancholia “the secret mainspring of a
new rhetoric.”
This makes such
melancholic artists’ creations a type of healing therapeutic process, while
giving meaning to the hitherto unsayable, thereby producing much cultural
beauty and joy, resulting in what Kristeva calls the melancholic “sublime.”
With or without her problematic occlusion of women (who she argues can never
similarly both detach from and yet retain vestiges of their early maternal
identification), Kristeva’s notion of the melancholic sublime is close to what
so many philosophers and artists of melancholy have said through the ages, none
more directly than Keats in his famous “Ode to Melancholy,” written like all
his most famous odes in 1819. Sufferers should not let go of their pain, he
urged, but remain attentive and responsive to its mysteries:
Ay, in the very temple
of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous
tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
From : Radical happiness
by Lynne Segal. Verso, 2017. Literary Hub
Lynne Segal
is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, London.
What is the true meaning
of happiness? Lynne Segal explores the radical potential of being together.
Why are we so obsessed
by the pursuit of happiness? With new ways to measure contentment we are told
that we have a right to individual joy. But at what cost?
In an age of increasing
individualism, we have never been more alone and miserable. But what if the
true nature of happiness can only be found in others? In Radical Happiness,
leading feminist thinker Lynne Segal believes that we have lost the art of
radical happiness— the art of transformative, collective joy. She shows that
only in the revolutionary potential of coming together it is that we can come
to understand the powers of flourishing.
Radical Happiness is a passionate
call for the re-discovery of the political and emotional joy that emerge when
we learn to share our lives together.
How do you define or promote
something as elusive as happiness? Most of us might tick the box marked
“cheerful” on Wednesday morning but could well consider ourselves crashingly
miserable come Sunday afternoon. And suppose we can empirically establish
contentment over a longish period, how do we unpick the underlying reasons for
it? A happy relationship or a triple-lock pension? A course of mindfulness or a
handful of supportive friends?
Lynne Segal gives us her take
on the matter straight off. The world is a place of “unbearable pain and
sadness”, the experience of melancholy is an important part of an authentic
emotional life. As for the official emphasis on happiness, it is insultingly
limited, dishonest and functional. “We need to resist the happiness imperative
beamed down at us from every other billboard. . .” In Segal’s view, “radical
happiness” involves us in an enterprise very different in scope and far more
meaningful: the seeking of political
change, and with it the experience of solidarity and collective joy.
Scathing of the ways that the
happiness industry has played into official narratives, Segal is particularly
critical of influential figures such as Richard Layard, Tony Blair’s so-called
happiness tsar, who chose to “ignore the effects of structural inequality on
the emotional distress it measures” preferring instead to consider emotions in
the context of Gross Domestic Product, then compounding his intellectual and
political sins by promoting the widespread use of the quick-fix remedy
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Instead of Layard, she says, we should all have
been listening to British epidemiologist Michael Marmot who “convincingly researched
the quite devastating effects of poverty and inequality on social misery
generally, and individually psychic health in particular.”
It is a feature of all Segal’s
work that when she decides to tackle a subject – be it the history of women’s
experience of heterosexuality, the rise of essentialist feminisms or, most
recently, the politics of ageing – she examines it from every conceivable
angle. She always makes me think of someone picking up a stone on the beach and
turning it, with infinite exhaustive care, this way and that. Here, then, she
gives us trenchant chapters, complete with plenty of historical and theoretical
readings. She takes on the decline of carnivals, festivals and other
expressions of communal joy (the spontaneous gathering of those “without
institutional power” is always threatening to the powerful) as well as our
changing understanding of depression, noting the sinister link between a rise
in diagnoses for serious depression and bipolar disorder, and the discovery and
marketing of drugs for treating them. “Within ten years of the launch of
Prozac, around 10 per cent of Americans over the age of six were taking
anti-depressants, including almost one-in-four in middle age.”
But it is also a feature of
Segal’s intellectual work that she weaves in her own personal experience in
order to illustrate her broader political points, particularly in her chapters
on the perils of sex and love. It’s important to be reminded of the history of
feminism’s hard work in uncovering women’s genuine sexual and emotional needs,
but fascinating to eavesdrop on Segal’s reassessment of her own experience of
the Sixties, a time in which many “women’s sexual confidence… was paper-thin,
my own included”, or of how, within relationships, she so easily becomes
“unbearably jealous”.
Ultimately, Segal has an
important argument to make – one that derives, inevitably, from her long years
as a libertarian, feminist and political activist. It is in working, with
others, for broader social change, that we find deeper meaning in our
existence. Or as Hannah Arendt put it: “No-one could be called happy or free
without participating, and having a share, in public power.”
This faces Segal with the
bleak times in which we live. Trump, Brexit, austerity – all lend themselves to
atomisation, inwardness, a kind of reckless misery. Segal is sharp on the
continuing popularity of dystopian fictions, one sign of the way in which
neo-liberalism’s discontents have entered our collective soul, and how
difficult it is even to speak of utopia – or utopias – in today’s political
climate. Once upon a time, the term involved the setting out of blueprints for
alternative societies, end goals for a better world. Today, she argues,
“utopia” is best understood as the tenacious continuance of a strong desire, a
“longing for… the improvement of the human condition”. How, she asks,
paraphrasing the cultural critic Raymond Williams, can we succeed in “making
hope practical, rather than despair convincing”? How indeed.
For Segal, the rise of new
social movements, here and around the world, is profoundly cheering, as is the
recent dominance of the left within the Labour Party: changes that restore the
faith of those, like herself, from older, once more politically hopeful and
active generations.
It is fascinating to read
Segal in conjunction with Riot Days, Maria Alyokhina’s gripping account of her
arrest and imprisonment as a member of Russia’s Pussy Riot collective. Written
in a lyrically fractured, cut-and-paste style, it’s a bit like having Kathy
Acker cooing at you in one ear and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn booming at you in the
other. (Acker’s recent biographer Chris Kraus provides an enthusiastic cover endorsement.)
For westerners, the Pussy Riot
phenomenon feels a little hard to interpret. The group seems like something out
of the Sixties, science-fiction and the milder end of top-shelf porn, all at
once. Certainly, the women mixed amazing courage with surely a massive dash of
naivety in deciding, in February 2012, to perform “Punk Prayer” (“Mother Mary,
banish Putin!”) in Moscow Cathedral. Alyokhina seems oddly surprised at their
arrest, oddly stoical about their sham trial and subsequent two-year prison
sentence.
Things turn worryingly
sinister when Alyokhina is sent to The Zone, a penal colony in the Urals, and
goes on hunger strike so as to win small daily concessions for herself and
other female prisoners. It might not be anyone else’s idea of radical
happiness, but here she comes to the sharp, if desperate, realisation that her
actions are significant “not for the imagined outcome, but for the very right
to protest. A narrow sliver of a right, in a huge field of injustice and
mistreatment. But I love this sliver of freedom.” Even under the harshest
possible conditions, she experiences the euphoria of mutual aid and unexpected
friendship.
In both these books, so
strikingly different in style and content, we find an eyes-wide-open
recognition of similar phenomena: the harshness of the world, the risks and
fallibility of politics and other human beings. Yet by the end, both these
activists somehow manage to convince and console us. Human solidarity matters,
and endures. The joy it engenders can be intense. Change can come. As Segal
concludes: “One way or another simply being together strengthens us.”
How to lift a heart: the joy in protest
and seeking political change by Melissa
Benn, The New Statesman , January 8, 2018.
Another
review :
Radical happiness: moments of
collective joy by Catherine Rottenberg, Open Democracy, 11 February 2018.
This becomes the
explicit concern of Radical Happiness, Segal’s latest book. “While there is
much official talk about happiness today,” she argues in its opening, “it
rarely includes any rhetoric of joy, least of all mention of collective joy.”
Happiness is often taken to be a personal experience, not one with political
implications. But for Segal, it is integral to our political struggles. Joy is
not only desirable; it “may actually be necessary for us even to envisage real
social change, that is, may be essential for us to resist mere accommodation to
the known harms of the present.” In other words, we need to conceive of and
yearn for happiness, not just for ourselves but for each other.
Like her friend Barbara
Ehrenreich, who tackled the witless and intrinsically conservative nature of
“positive thinking” in her 2010 book Bright-Sided, Segal rejects today’s
dominant discourse concerning happiness. The “happiness agenda” of governments
and employers is “concerned above all with softening the costs of ever-rising
social wretchedness” without disrupting the conditions that produce that
wretchedness. As a result, the responsibility for being happy is ladled out to
each individual rather than conceived as a cooperative project.
This is not to say that
happiness is categorically inaccessible to individuals, but rather that “the
triggers for joy are almost always something others might share…even if we
experience them alone” and, further, that joy is particularly acute in
“situations we feel we have worked to help create.” Segal’s predilection for
politically derived pleasure is obvious, so she tries to temper her own
enthusiasm by acknowledging that “politics is just one form of collective
bonding.” Even so, she cannot help but hasten to add that it is “an enduringly
significant and transformative one”—in other words: the best.
Much of Radical
Happiness consists of very smart, if familiar, overviews of the history of
depression, the fraught nature of romantic love, and how modern culture is
hostile to exuberant behavior and those things that make us happy. Segal can be
an elegant writer when she gives herself space to expand at length on her
insights. But her default mode is that of the synthesizer or documentarian, and
parts of Radical Happiness, like Straight Sex and Slow Motion before it, are
packed so full of others’ ideas that it’s hard to discern her own. That’s not
necessarily a bad thing, though such extended summarizing risks and
occasionally yields enervation for the reader.
Yet what’s most striking
about Radical Happiness and Segal’s work, taken as a whole, is how completely
they seem to have been conceived in the spirit of service. It’s an
old-fashioned notion in 2018, especially outside of spiritual or religious
circles; today’s activism is usually understood less as taking care of others
and more as opposition, righteousness, or emergency response. (In her argument
for utopian thinking, Segal quotes the feminist theorist Wendy Brown:
“political identities [are] founded upon a sense of personal injury, and the
need for protection, rather than generating any more progressive political
vision of the future.”) But Segal’s writing is not about herself, even when it
ostensibly is. (“This is not a memoir,” she insists at one point in Making
Trouble.) Instead, her feminism, despite being profoundly personal, pursues
collective liberation; even the fact that “liberation” sounds so corny to
contemporary ears is further evidence of what feminism has lost over the years.
Given this view of
feminism’s power to truly unite women, as opposed to merely forging superficial
alliances of convenience that catapult a few to fame, Segal’s unsung status
begins to make better sense. She wants to understand and to educate; she wants
to advance her politics but not herself, and she hopes to achieve a sense of
individual liberation—the sort of personal freedom envisioned by the Push in
her teenage years—through community-minded work that promotes the elevation of
others.
Radical Happiness
ultimately arrives at a convincing argument about our need to overcome the
now-common tendency to view dystopian thinking as a political act in and of
itself. “Neo-liberalism has had one remarkable success, despite all its own
contradictions and disasters,” Segal writes. “It has convinced so many that its
version of predatory, corporate capitalism is inescapable.” To formulate a
utopia to take its place, we must concern ourselves not with “final goals or
end-points, but rather with desire: the collective longing” for better
conditions for us all. If happiness is “not so much an emotion, a psychic state
or inner disposition, but rather a way of acting in the world,” then so is the
path to real social change. It is defined not by a list of demands, but by a
commitment to the common good. A feminism that’s about showing up for each
other and not merely ourselves: how radical.
Feminist Living. Lynne Segal’s sentimental education. By
Charlotte Shane. The Nation, January 24, 2018
“You know
that Gramscian statement 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.'
And we do need to see that the world we're living in is a fairly frightening
place for all sorts of reasons. Our dystopic fantasies are not coming from
nowhere. But there is another side, when people come together and say 'this
isn't the world we want, this isn't how I want to live.' When we manage to do
that, we usually start smiling. We start knowing there are ways to be together,
with others, where we might be able to create something different.”
Writer
Lynne Segal explains why transformative happiness can only be found with other
people - as a challenge to the lonely, precarious reality of life under
neoliberal capitalism, and as a utopian reminder that a new world can still be
built, together, for everyone.
Listen to
the interview with Lynne Segal . This is Hell, March 3, 2018.
Educating
Desire: Moments of Shared Joy. Lecture
by Lynne Segal. May 14, 2018.
In this
lecture, Lynne Segal, professor of
Psychology and Gender Studies, calls for happiness based on moments of
solidarity arising from collective claims and endeavours. Only if we accept responsibility for the
world we share, and the commitment to transform it could we be truly and
radically happy.
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