Fuchs

"In the life world, then, simultaneity and contemporariness are continuously produced. As on the biological level, however, these synchronizations are not at all constant. Periodically, we experience asynchronies, i.e. situations that require us to adapt to external changes, to compensate for disturbances and backlogs, or to advance in our development along the biographical steps preset by life and society. Uncompleted tasks, unresolved conflicts, strain and distress accumulate, thus inhibiting or precluding our progress toward the future. Traumatic events and serious experiences of guilt, loss or separation persistently affect the experience of time. They entangle the person in his/her past, and he/she temporarily loses lived synchrony with others. Hence, in loss or guilt, a new time experience arises: It is not the time of ‘not yet’, the time of desires and wishes directed toward the future, but the time of ‘no more’, the time of the irrevocable past. It corresponds to a falling-out of common time which runs on, while the individual cannot get rid of something experienced or done. It is mainly by separations from others to whom our lived time is primarily related, that we experience the irreversibility and the rule of time. Such discrepancies and deviations from the present, or the periodical accumulation of the missed, the lost, or the unfinished, require specific processes of coping and resynchronization. With these, the individual regains connection to the common, intersubjective time. I will name only a few of such processes: Forgetting and Repression. Remembering binds us to the past. Field psychology discovered the ‘Zeigarnik effect’, which means that uncompleted and unfinished tasks are more easily remembered than completed ones [14]. The faults, the guilt, the missed goals are inscribed into memory for good, as static engramms; a glance into the past is enough to revive them again. Nietzsche stressed the strong connection of conscience and memory, and wrote pointedly: ‘Only what does not stop hurting remains in memory’ [15, p. 311]".

"A complete desynchronization between individual and environment is characteristic of melancholic depression. It ensues when coping with major change fails, i.e. individual resynchronization mechanisms do not succeed, but break down. Moreover, depressive psychopathology itself expresses the uncoupling of the resonance and synchrony of individual and environment. The typical constellation triggering melancholia has been characterized by Tellenbach as a situation of remanence. The melancholic does not feel equal to the speed of external changes or to necessary developments. He gives up in the face of painful processes of detachment or elimination, he refrains from necessary role changes, and he shrinks back from confrontation with the basic facts of existence: isolation, finiteness, decision, guilt. The inability to enter a real grief process probably plays the main triggering role. The required untying of bonds seems too threatening and painful; the loss is not acknowledged, the primary affect suppressed. Hence essential resynchronization processes are missed. This corresponds to the premorbid striving of the melancholic type to avoid discrepancies in relation to his environment at any rate. The ‘hypernomia’ which Kraus [17] has worked out as the hallmark of the melancholic’s social identity, is a ‘hypersynchrony’ as well. Down to the microdynamics of everyday behaviour, the melancholic seeks continuous resonance by compliance and friendliness, social attunement, punctuality and timely completion of his tasks. He must not be indebted to somebody just because he feels he is not capable of achieving the inner processes of release: the forgetting of the unfinished, the freeing of debts, the development towards emancipation and autonomy. This inability to cope with desynchronizations inhibits his personal maturation and renders him all the more vulnerable toward inevitable biographical breaks or role changes. The capitulation before an inescapable task of coping or development now leads exactly to what the melancholic fears most of all: to the break-down of coherence and resonance with his environment in depressive illness. Once the resynchronizing mechanisms fail, apparently a phylogenetically older defense mechanism is released: It consists of a passive and submissive behaviour of humility, and when intensified, in a blockade, paralysis or ‘freeze’, thus reminiscent of a ‘playing dead reflex’. This corresponds to a conversion from social to biological desynchronization, leading to a reaction of the organism as a whole, namely a psychophysical stasis. The triggering of depression by overall exhaustion or serious somatic illness shows that a vital desynchronization may play a primary causal role as well. The physiological desynchronizations are well-known as far as their manifestations are concerned, though their underlying mechanisms have not yet been explained. Let us think of the disturbances of neuro-endocrine and temperature periods, of the sleep-wake rhythm, of the female cycle, then the loss of drive, appetite or sexuality, and finally the seasonal depressions as desynchronizations in relation to the annual period. The psychophysiological regeneration in sleep is also seriously disturbed. Depressed persons awake early in the morning after a disrupted and shortened sleep and then start brooding over their faults and fears. The dream phases as well as dream memories are reduced, the contents mainly negative, which means that the ‘psychohygienic’ effect of sleep is lost [18, 19]. The uncoupling from the environment is also manifested in an unpleasant insistence of the body. A leaden heaviness, constant exhaustion, and a sense of restriction and tightening make the patient feel the bare materiality of his body that is otherwise hidden in the movement and performance of life. In addition, a loss of vitality in many systems of the organism comes about. In serious cases, a literal freezing and ‘reification’ of the body ensues which is no longer capable of resonance with its environment [20].

Psychosocial Desynchronization

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 family 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 in 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 any more. The dominance of the past is only the other side of the loss of protensivity, of the lack of drive, needs and interests that otherwise direct us to the future. With increasing inhibition, the basic movement of life finally comes to a standstill, as anthropological psychopathology has described it. The depressive has fallen out of common time and has become, as it were, a living anachronism. He literally lives in another, sluggish time. Nevertheless, external, intersubjective time runs on for him, i.e. it passes him by. Because of this uncoupling, it appears as an empty, only transient time that he cannot fill or shape any more, like a continuous call: ‘Gone! Over!’. These phenomenological analyses of time disturbance can be experimentally verified, as Mundt et al. [21] have shown again recently. Depressive persons experience a time dilation, i.e. they estimate given time intervals to be longer than the actual objectively measured time. Even so, it seems important that this external or worldtime is socially constituted, and not a mere physical time".

Thomas Fuchs