In his General Psychopathology, Jaspers, who was not just a philosopher but also a psychiatrist, is interested in the experience of time in mental disorders. According to the anthropology of the phenomenological tradition that has Husserl and Heidegger as its founding fathers, to be a human being is to be a temporal being with a direction, a sense of continuity, and some plan for the future (what Husserl called protention and Heidegger conceptualized as the ec-static temporality of being, the anticipation of future possibilities). But this, as Jaspers points out, is precisely what depressed patients lack: After quoting a depressive patient complaining that “it feels as if it is...always the same moment, it is like a timeless void”, Jaspers comments: “A depressed patient feels as if time did not want to go on.” (84). To Jaspers, this experience or awareness of time is intimately connected to an “emotional atmosphere” (86), in that emotional changes make themselves noticeable in the experience of time: “A depressed patient, suffering from ‘terrible emptiness’ and a feeling of ‘having lost all feeling’ reported – ‘I cannot see the future, just as if there were none. I think everything is going to stop now and tomorrow there will be nothing at all.’ Patients know there is another day tomorrow but this awareness has changed from what it was like before. Even the next five minutes do not lie ahead as they used to do. Such patients have no decisions, no worries, no hopes for the future.” (86) Jaspers even develops the fruitful idea of what could be called a metafeeling, in particular the idea of the feeling of a non-feeling (Gefühl der Gefühllosigkeit or Fühlen eines Nichtfühlen), so that in depression one feels nothing but this feeling of nothing is definitely felt. Or to put it another way: the feeling of not feeling anything is itself a feeling. This is not sheer sophistry, but rather the ultimate – affective – horror of depression, which will become clear in the case of David Foster Wallace. In any case, it becomes crucial to explore not just depression as a feeling, but how that feeling feels; what depression feels like.11 11
In fact, the DSM relies on a definition of depression as a mood or affective disorder. I agree with the wording of the definition but not with its content. Perhaps depression is indeed an affective disorder, or a mood disorder, but the question is: how does that affective or mood disorder feel? What is the affect of the affective disorder, so to speak? This is just one of the reasons I do not subscribe to the definition to be found in the DSM. A more fundamental problem is the reductive and rather old-fashioned understanding of mood and affect informing the DSM: The tendency to de-contextualize moods and affects, to rely on the ancient dualism of body and mind/brain, to pathologize certain emotional responses and so on. Theoretically this dissertation is therefore more in line not only with Jaspers, but also recent affect theory too, whose insights and attainments are overall able to nuance, supplement and complicate the definition of depression as a mood or affect disorder presented in the DSM. One of the cornerstones of affect theory, taken somewhat misleadingly as a whole, is firstly that feelings and affects must be taken seriously, and secondly that affects are as much collective, social and political phenomena as they are psychological, private and individual. Crucial reference points in this regard are Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. Furthermore, affect theory often seeks to depathologize negative feelings of sadness and unhappiness, thereby, as Ann Cvetokovich writes, granting questions like “How do I feel?” or “How does capitalism feel?” a real legitimacy (3). 8
To return to the experience of time in depression as it has been described in the phenomenological tradition, Ludwig Binswanger, in the aforementioned work Melancholie und Manie, states that depression is characterized by a protentional disturbance whereby the depressed person experiences a ‘futural’ vacuum or a vacuum as the future (27). That the future is or has been lost is not a supposition or a conjecture, but documented fact (43-44). The future is, so to speak, always already considered a thing of the past. Many empirical studies have been conducted in relation to the depressive experience of a slowing or stoppage of time, but the results are mixed and equivocal.12 Furthermore, such studies tend to “measure the estimation or production of defined time intervals rather than a general subjective experience of the flow of time.” (Oberfeld et al. 1). In other words, they do not really capture the phenomenological experience of time in depression, which is the primary concern here. Things appear differently if we turn to American psychiatrist Frederick T. Melges’s study of depression, Time and Inner Future. Here, Melges offers an account of depression as a spiral of hopelessness, implying first and foremost a block to the future. He writes that hopelessness is like a cloud drawing “a curtain on the future” and quotes one of his patients who describes how "the future looks cold and bleak, and I seem frozen in time." (178). Several phenomenological scholars emphasize this particular aspect of depression: the feeling of being stuck, stagnated, that the race is run and that the present – which is hell – becomes all there is and all that can ever be imagined to be.13 This is the first aspect of the formal structure of time in depression: A subjective relation to time. This relation is, however, related to what could tentatively be called a social time; the time of the environment and the surrounding world. In the words of German psychiatrist and philosopher, Thomas Fuchs a de-synchronization occurs in depression that is as social as it is subjective; the depressive desynchronization manifests, more precisely, in the very interplay between subjective and social time. In the first instance, the term describes a state of disturbance in the temporal being, within which the flow of lived experience is brought to a halt, transforming temporality from “implicit” to “explicit”, in much in the same way as Heidegger – whose thoughts on temporality and subjectivity must not be
“Depression, or alternative accounts of what gets called depression, is thus a way to describe neoliberalism and globalization, or the current state of political economy, in affective terms.” (11). 12 See for instance: Sévigny et al; Bschor et al; Gil and Droit-Volet; Ghaemi 2007. 13 See: Wyllie, 180; Rønberg, 185; Karp, 23-24. 9
undervalued here – says that we only notice the given tool – a hammer, for instance – at that moment when it does not work anymore. ‘Normally’, Fuchs says, we do not pay any attention to time, we just live in it. But in depression this is no longer the case. In this type of situation, time is suddenly noticed: It becomes perceptively and painfully out of joint, out of synch ("Implicit and Explicit Temporality" 196). The key point about this de-synchronization is that it is not merely biological, but also relational and intersubjective, in the sense that the depressed patient is out of synch with the surrounding environment and the social clock as much as she is out synch with herself and her own biological clock: “[T]he depressive suffers the loss of sympathetic resonance; he gets ‘out of synch’. While dialogues are normally accompanied by a continuous synchronization of bodily gestures and gazes, his expression sets and loses its modulation. The affect attunement with others fails.” (“Melancholia as a Desynchronization”183).
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