Reflections, Winter 2019. Volume 16, No. 4

Nothing generates a sense of helplessness more than depression; both in the depressed person and the therapeutic agent.

Depression strikes a universally vulnerable core. It’s no accident that our various festivals of light are celebrated in the season of deepest darkness; festivals that memorialize cracks of possibility within that darkness.

Clinically, depression is associated with a premature loss of the play of parental presence – the realized enjoyment of a sustaining human environment. The point being: the only reality keeping us from falling into a vague threat of darkness is … each other. Without that, the reliability of life that acknowledges the inevitable reality of caprice and death can feel unsustainable.

We are adrift at sea in a somewhat fragile boat unless something essential to our sense of being alive happens between us.

The philosophers and theologians almost universally call this something Love – an occurrence or event that happens only between us. This event requires allowing empty spaces of suspended judgment and unknown possibility at the heart of our embrace.

Depression, a foreclosure on the play of possibility, fiercely clings to a violated entitlement. A sense of existential injustice is the broken heart of depression.

Any therapeutic address to that injustice must be within a recognition of the raw reality of life; a therapeutic stance far deeper than the uses of ‘cognitive tricks’. Such an address occurs only within a genuine acknowledgement of our shared and vulnerable human condition.

There but for the grace of God … is more than a sigh of relief.

***

לחיים

against the death grip

of depression’s

logic

allow

between us

a spontaneous moment

of play

and laugh

After Buber, Kristeva and Winnicott

South Garden Press, New York