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Major Depressive Disorder: an Embodied Disruption of Agency

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Major Depressive Disorder: an Embodied Disruption of Agency View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER: AN EMBODIED DISRUPTION OF AGENCY AND A DISRUPTION OF A FORM OF LIFE By Rachel G. Everett Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy May, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor José Medina Professor David Wood Professor Lucius Outlaw Professor Linda Manning Copyright © 2013 by Rachel Gabrielle Everett All Rights Reserved To Eric with deep gratitude TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Preface............................................................................................................................... vii Chapter I. MAJOR DEPRESSION: FIELDWORK IN PHILOSOPHY ......................................1 Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Major Depression’ ...................................................................................................3 Problem of definition ...............................................................................................3 Depression, estrangement, and loss .......................................................................12 Justification: Fieldwork in Philosophy ..................................................................16 Methodology and Literature ......................................................................21 Wittgenstein ...............................................................................................23 Phenomenology..........................................................................................25 Psychotherapy ............................................................................................26 Philosophy from the borders ......................................................................28 First-person accounts .................................................................................30 II. FORM OF LIFE AND ITS DISRUPTION...............................................................38 Introduction ............................................................................................................38 ‘Form of Life’ ........................................................................................................39 Wittgenstein’s use of ‘form of life’ ............................................................39 Affective agreement and affective disruption .............................................50 Familiarity and ‘feeling at home’ in a form of life .....................................55 The Disruption of a Form of Life ..........................................................................58 Loss of ease .................................................................................................58 Defamiliarization ........................................................................................61 Marginalization in a form of life .................................................................65 Conclusion .............................................................................................................68 III. DEPRESSIVE PERCEPTION..................................................................................70 Introduction ............................................................................................................70 Seeing-through Depression ....................................................................................72 Depression and problems of perception .......................................................72 Seeing-through .............................................................................................77 Attunement ...................................................................................................82 Spatiality ................................................................................................................87 Non-depressive and depressive spatialization .............................................87 Depressive spatiality ....................................................................................90 Temporality ............................................................................................................96 Non-depressive and depressive temporalization ..........................................96 Depressive temporality ..............................................................................100 Omnipresence of the present ............................................................100 A living-death .................................................................................100 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................112 IV. ALTERED SENSE OF SELF AND DISRUPTED RELATIONALITY ...............114 Introduction ..........................................................................................................114 Part One: Sense of Self and Depression ..............................................................118 Illness and identity .....................................................................................118 Loss of self .................................................................................................127 Loss of ‘me’ .....................................................................................128 Intrapsychic conflict .........................................................................132 Depression embodied .......................................................................142 Disrupted cognitive attachments ......................................................148 Depressive Identification ...........................................................................155 Identifying ‘depression’ ....................................................................155 Identifying with depression ...............................................................161 Part Two: Depression and Sociality .....................................................................165 Depressive Identity ....................................................................................166 Depressive withdrawal ......................................................................167 Interpellation and depression ............................................................171 Cultural oppression of deviance and the normativity of mental health ..........................................................................................177 Flight from authenticity .............................................................181 Social Structuring of Depression ................................................................185 Diversification of the depressive experience .............................186 Gender, sex, and sexual orientation ...........................................189 Class ...........................................................................................192 Race............................................................................................193 Silence and Disclosure .........................................................................................198 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................202 V. Discursive Disruption and the Estrangement from Affective Meaning ..................204 Introduction ..........................................................................................................204 Part One: The Estrangement from Meaning and Language.................................206 ‘Language’ and ‘language-loss’ ...................................................................206 Meaning ......................................................................................................213 Language and its inadequacies....................................................................222 Language as co-existence ...................................................................230 The body and speech ...........................................................................235 Part Two: Recovery of Discursive Agency .........................................................245 Rebuilding and revitalization .......................................................................245 Recognition and receptivity .........................................................................250 VI. CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................257 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................264 PREFACE Never to be rid of oneself, this is the curse of depression. Never to have a self, this is the plight of the depressed. To be both rid of oneself and to become a self, this is suicide. Lost to others in isolation, present to self in pain; silence or scream is the choice of the depressed. It is absolute separation and omnipresence. The self is a symptom, a cure, and a source of depression, all excess and loss, never quite a self and never not a self. Neither fully a protest against the loss of a beloved object, nor fully a protest against the structures that constitute
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