Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
grief and guilt. The depressed person seems to suffer the loss of somebody or
something, and she often blames herself for this very loss and the feeling of
worthlessness it has left behind. Grief could be taken to be a mood (sadness),
but in the sense that it is coupled to the loss of an object (or subject) as a form
of mourning, it is rather an emotion. It seems, however, that most depressed
persons do not know what or whom they are missing and mourning. The
grief rather takes on a mood-quality in the sense of coloring and determining
the whole being-
in
-the-world of the person in an unhomelike way.
In his famous essay
Mourning and Melancholia
, written in 1915 (1957a),
Sigmund Freud is looking for an explanation of the mourning and feeling of
self-guilt in depression.
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His hypothesis is that the reason the melancholic
(depressed) person does not know what she is mourning is that the object
of the feeling has been repressed and consequently made unconscious. The
melancholic has experienced early abandonment by the mother, but this loss
was too hard to bear and must therefore be repressed. The feelings of loss,
desperation and anger have instead been directed towards the melancholic
herself, which explains the feelings of guilt and worthlessness.
Freud is careful in the essay to point out that this is a hypothesis, which
is in need of empirical corroboration. It is doubtful that psychoanalysts
have been successful in proving Freud to be right on this point, although it
remains beyond doubt today that a miserable childhood, involving different
kinds of abandonment and abuse, is correlated to a higher risk of developing
depression and other forms of mental disorders. But it is also questionable
whether such a hypothesis could
ever
be proven by empirical investigations.
How would one go about proving the presence of a specifi c
unconscious
object or thought (my mother, i.e. I blame my mother) behind the feelings
of grief and self-guilt? And why would it have to be the mother? Could not
later losses in life provoke the same kind of repression if they were severe
enough?
15
The phenomenological fi eld of investigation is consciousness. This fi eld
should certainly be expanded to cover the regions of the unconscious that
Freud calls the preconscious - that is, the spheres of experience that are
not in the center of focal awareness, but rather supports this awareness and
which could be
made
conscious by refl ection (attunement, embodiment, and
the horizonal patterns of meaning constituting the world) (Zahavi 1999:
203ff.). But Freud's main point is, of course, that the repressed domains
of our inner life are inaccessible to such a phenomenological refl ection.
The unconscious represents a system of thoughts, which is inaccessible to
consciousness and which is governed by a totally different kind of logic,
but which, nevertheless, infl uences the fashion of our conscious thoughts,
feelings and behavior in a forceful way. From a phenomenological point
of view, Freud's theory of the unconscious represents hypotheses that are
not accessible to investigation, since they can only be approached indirectly
by symptoms that do not reveal their origin by themselves. Freud's meta-
psychology is similar to natural science in trying to fi nd
causal
explanations
