Fuchs

Let us now consider the desynchronization concerning intersubjective time; first, it becomes manifest in a retreat from social obligations. Depressed patients avoid the environment with its social or physical timekeepers. They do not get up on time, their tasks are taken over by others, important...decisions are made without them. Futile attempts to keep pace with events and to catch up on tasks increase the feeling of remanence. Moreover, the 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 [11], his expression sets and loses its modulation...affect attunement with others fails. This is connected to the inability to participate emotionally with other persons or things, to be attracted or affected by them. Painfully, the patient experiences his rigidity in contrast to the movements of life going on in his environment. The desynchronization also becomes manifest in a failure to achieve forgetting and elimination. ‘Everything goes through my head again and again, and I always have to wonder if I did things right. I can’t sleep at night because my thoughts stay with the past day, and in the morning everything comes back to me in terror’. It is the torture of not being able to forget, of being constantly forced to remember and therefore not arriving at the present...The dominance of the past is...the other side of a lack of protensivity, of a lack of drive...and interests that otherwise direct us to the future.

Thomas Fuchs