Images of depression: A theoretical study of depression and melancholia as expressions of an absence of imagining and an unrequited unconscious need for transformation.

摘要

This dissertation is a theoretical study using a hermeneutic methodology. It has a chronological structure that begins with portraiture of melancholy in the time of ancient Greece, and moves with these images of melancholy as they change and alter through history, touching on medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and images during the Industrial Revolution where melancholy was turned into depression, and ending with contemporary interpretations of depression. An historical penchant for both revering and abhorring depression and melancholy is revealed.;In exploring the ambivalent and changing images of depression through history, we witness a sense of the fictions inherent in our current images of depression. The dissertation then argues that since depression and melancholy are indeed generalized historically and globally, they are imbued with the values of transformation and articulate profound human loss—a loss of an animated self in an animated world. The images of depression have a desire to be told.;Depression, as we see throughout this discourse, can be viewed as multiple elements of human experience that are transforming through time. From this perspective this work attempts an amplification of depression and develops two main points: one is to articulate depression as a sense of absence of imagination, a poverty of images, while the other is to imagine depression as transformative in nature and belonging to the inherent natural core of human Beingness. Through our exploration we also find that depression is linked with our primordial sense of death and annihilation and discover that images of death and annihilation invade and thwart our experiences of therapeutic imagining of depression. Likewise, as we shall see, annihilation is deeply connected with the oneness experience.;It is argued that depression is entirely relevant to human experience and that there is an urgent need for interpretation over intervention, especially in light of psychology concretizing affective states into the domain of the medical model and thus mental disease. Most notably, we will indicate that rather than concretize and pathologize depression, it is imperative that we imagine into depression, allowing it to imagine into us.