Have We Always Been Depressed? Yes. The Answer is Yes.

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.

Verso

    

                                                                        

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.

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona