Free Manufacturing depression by Gary Greenberg

compelling than seeking the pleasure of return, that getting hold of himself “ carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.” It’s the pleasure of self-control, of efficacy and self-reliance, and of living in a world where effect follows upon cause, where what happens next can be predicted and controlled. The boy’s delight in his game was the precursor of a grownup’s comfort in the civilized world.
    No matter how well a child accomplishes this task, however, the hatred and violent impulses remain, held at bay by individual effort—particularly the conscience—and by the collective force of civilization. Without this achievement, life would be nasty, brutish, and short; with it, however, the nastiness is merely pushed back to the distant reaches of our minds, into the unconscious. The unconscious never forgets, and trouble like melancholia is kindled when the original hurt and the violence it conjured reemerge to consciousness—a catastrophe that doesn’t require anything as dire as death, that could be as simple and banal as the demise of a bad marriage or any other disappointment through which an opposition of love and hate can be introduced to a relationship or an ambivalence already present can be intensified.
Whatever insult set off the hatred in the first place can’t be avenged—maybe the loved one is dead or just not available or doesn’t see what he has done—and whatever history gives the ambivalence its peculiar shape is long past. Not only that, but unconscious longings are deep and intense, their satisfaction forbidden.
     
    For some unlucky people—those with parents who repeat those insults and disappointments, who thus provide a feast to feed our ambivalence—melancholia is the only available currency with which to buy off their hatred.
Patients manage to avenge themselves on the original objects along the detour of self-punishment, and to torment their loved ones by means of being ill, having taken to illness in order to avoid showing their hostility directly.
     
    This is why, Freud says, “ Prince Hamlet has ready for himself and everyone else” a catalog of his own shortcomings, and why so many other melancholics do the same: “Because everything disparagingthat they express about themselves is basically being said about someone else”—the person who died or left or didn’t come through, and all the other people who did that, and so on back to the original objects of ambivalence: mum and dad. Whom you cannot hate or kill because, incompetent or mean or neglectful as they may be, they are all that you have.
    This is also why self-reproach is the identifying mark of melancholia, whether the occasion is the loss of love or the rise of ambition and success: because it signals that the crucial fiction—that we are wholly on the side of our own better angels, that we don’t also hate those whom we love or want to destroy the people who have hurt us—has failed. “ The loss of the love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence of love relationships to come to the fore,” Freud wrote, which means that it is a likely time for us to glimpse the bottomless, destructive desires that haunt our conscious lives. The melancholic is the person whose mum and dad made it impossible for him to maintain the illusion that normally keeps this awareness at bay.
    The biggest weakness in Freudian theory—and perhaps the major factor in its fall from grace—is that it is, as philosophers of science like Karl Popper would put it, nonfalsifiable and therefore not subject to scientific test. Psychoanalysis is a self-contained system, its basic tenets impossible to verify. How do you test for the presence of the unconscious, which exists largely as an absence? The answer is that you don’t. You accept it on faith and go from there. In this respect, psychoanalysis is a throwback to Hippocratic medicine, to a time when wise men postulated forces that