Fuchs

At the beginning, I mentioned the social processes of acceleration to which we all are subjected. It can easily be foreseen that the permanent revolution of the life world will increasingly result in desynchronizations that demand too much adaptability of the individual. As psychiatrists, we are close to this development, for more and more people are coming to our wards who cannot tolerate the accelerated modernizations and fall into the uncoupling of depression. Their suffering shows that man’s capability of biological and social resynchronization cannot be increased at will, however variable his nature may be. The German philosopher Theunissen [22] has spoken of a ‘negative theology’, or a ‘dominion’ of time as an objective process to which we are all exposed, but which the melancholic person has to suffer helplessly and defencelessly. I think that in this point Theunissen is subject to a mystification. We ourselves are the ones who have created the dominion of time to which we are then exposed as a seemingly independent process. The ‘social construction of reality’ [23] essentially implies the construction of time, and with the ever growing socialization of individuals, this construct appears as an autonomous, godlike force that demands its sacrifices. It is this alienated and reified time that in melancholia falls back on the subject from the outside. The depressive shows us vicariously that as individuals and as society, we are equally confronted with the task to reappropriate the time that we have made our enemy...

Thomas Fuchs (Melancholia as a Desynchronization: Towards a Psychopathology of Interpersonal Time)