A Psychoanalytically-informed explanation of why you might be feeling very sad or depressed: “Why do I feel stuck?”, “Why can’t I seem to get moving in life?”
Do you find yourself sleeping too much or too little? Has your appetite changed in ways you can’t quite explain? Perhaps you withdraw from others, not out of choice, but because the effort required to engage feels insurmountable. These shifts may be accompanied by a vague sense of apathy, confusion, or even anger affects that do not always present themselves in an obvious way. In some cases, despair takes hold so firmly that one might even contemplate the unthinkable.
Depression is not simply a disruption in mood but a force that arrests the movement of psychic life, much like a heart that falters in its rhythm. The person may carry on working, speaking, appearing functional while internally, something has come to a standstill. What remains most elusive is the why. When everything appears ‘fine’ on the surface, why does disillusionment emerge?
Freud taught us that suffering is never without meaning, even when it appears senseless. In Lacanian terms, depression often signals a deadlock in desire, where the subject finds itself unable to move forward, yet unable to articulate what holds it back either. The experience of being trapped in one’s own mind, isolated from the Other, can generate profound shame or guilt, leading one to think that they alone must find a way out. But what if this impasse, this impossibility, is not to be ‘fixed’ but rather listened to?
In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, we do not seek to ‘cure’ depression as one might an infection. Instead, we listen for the unconscious formations that structure a person’s suffering. Often, depression is interwoven with questions of anger, frustration, and lost desire, questions that, when addressed in the space of analysis, can produce something unexpected. By disrupting the repetitive, frozen narrative, an encounter with the unexpected, a slip, a moment of surprise, can reintroduce movement where it seemed impossible.
Depression, then, is not simply the absence of vitality; it is an unconscious response that calls for an interpretation. What might your symptom be telling? This is our work together in psychoanalytic treatment.