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Eva Meijer the Melancholic Animal — on Depression

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Eva Meijer the Melancholic Animal — on Depression H U M a N I M A L I A 11:1 Eva Meijer The Melancholic Animal — On Depression and Animality Why do we suffer? In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud wonders what the use of grief and melancholy is, and sets out to understand the meaning of these experiences. He begins by distinguishing melancholy from mourning. Both phenomena share certain characteristics: a feeling of dejection, loss of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, slowing down of activities. In melancholy a loss of self- esteem is added to this picture, as well as an expectation of punishment. The mourning individual has a clear reason for experiencing aforementioned feelings, usually the loss of a loved one, an object, or an idea. She needs to move through a process of mourning, a fixed time period in which the world is empty, in order to be able to enter that world, love, and open up again. Mourning is thus a normal process — even if Freud questions why we should feel pain when we lose someone or something — connected to life’s structure. Melancholy is a pathology: instead of the loss of an external object, one experiences a loss of ego, leading to a death drive. Freud thinks that an actual loss lies at the basis of both melancholy and mourning. However, in the process of mourning one severs the ties with the lost object, while in melancholy one identifies with the loss and internalizes it, which is a narcissistic movement (Kristeva). Freud approached melancholy as pathology of the mind and investigated its workings and meaning in his individual patients. He recognized the physiological components of the condition, such as a loss of appetite or sleep, but explained these as stemming from mental processes, or more specifically: as psychological responses to earlier events in life. Depression, as we now call what Freud named melancholy, is still considered to be a mental phenomenon. While its exact cause is unknown, it is assumed that it is caused by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. Genes and childhood experiences, together with stressful life events, might trigger depressive episodes. Depression is seen as an illness that should be treated with therapy based on dialogue, and/or antidepressant medication. Discourses of healing, in the western world, often focus mainly on medical solutions. They are aimed at a specific type of neoliberal human individual and rely on a problematic dichotomy between body and mind. This approach to depression and healing neglects the cultural, social, and political processes 110 contributing to depression, as well as the other subjects affected — human and nonhuman. In this essay I set out on a different road in understanding depression, by focusing on the cultural and historical structures of this phenomenon, in which I pay specific attention to interconnections with animality. The experience of depression fundamentally challenges common western ideas about what it means to be human. When experiencing depression, Cartesian distinctions between body and mind prove to be untenable, and existing notions of rationality, autonomy, and agency, often seen as defining characteristics of humans, are challenged. Zooming out to the level of culture, we find that like madness more generally, melancholy and depression are historically shaped constructions. These constructions are related in manifold ways to the construction of the concept of animality. Focusing on these connections is helpful for rethinking depression in the human case, and for better understanding nonhuman animal depression. Other animals are often neglected in studies of depression, even though they may suffer from it, too. Furthermore, human and animal depressions are often related, symbolically and in different practices. Examining the psycho- geographical dimensions of depression in connection to animality can contribute to a different discourse, which is more inclusive and brings to light the social and political factors involved. 1. Experiencing depression. Phenomenologically, depression is characterized by a disturbance of the experience of the world, relations with others, time, and oneself. Medical ethicist Kevin Aho argues that in order to understand depression we cannot rely solely on a medical discourse that treats this condition as a chemical problem; in order to grasp its meaning, we need to also listen to the stories of those experiencing depression. Drawing on many first person narratives, he distinguishes three defining characteristics of depression. The first is a disruption of spatial orientation and motility, in which the depressed person literally finds it hard to move and perform basic tasks, which leads to a collapse of life-world. The second is a state of emotional indifference that reduces one’s ability to care about things and is, similar to what Freud described, not directed at a specific object but at the world as a whole. The third characteristic of depression is that it diminishes possibilities for self-creation, because it restricts the subject to the identity of a depressed person, instead of as someone capable of developing and interpreting herself in other ways in the world. In these three ways depression challenges some of the key features of humanism, such as agency, autonomy, and rationality. Hum animalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019) 111 Depression often paralyzes the subject, making it impossible to participate in daily activities, which obstructs one’s agency. Even if one is still physically capable of acting, the emotional and cognitive dimensions of existence are emptied of meaning and sense. Depression for these reasons cuts one off from functioning in a world one once took for granted. In this experience, body and mind cannot be separated: bad thoughts and feelings are primordial and the lack of mental freedom is interconnected with a lack of physical freedom. This may lead to a loss of autonomy. The same applies to rationality: the depressed person cannot trust her own thoughts, because they are muddy and negative, and cannot be corrected by reason. Interconnected with this is the fact that the depressed person cannot trust her feelings, because they work against her. Depressed thoughts and feelings of worthlessness mutually reinforce each other. To conceptualize this further, it is helpful to turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty, according to whom body-mind dualism is untenable. Our mental states are always embodied, he argues, and we think and perceive with our bodies. This does not mean he denies the existence of the mental or reduces everything to matter; rather, the use of our mind cannot be separated from our situated, physical being in the world. Bodies are not objects that our minds control. Depression shows us this very clearly. Thoughts affect not only the depressed person’s mood, but can also literally affect her capacity to move, and in turn one’s mood and physical disposition affects the thoughts that are thought, and so on. According to Merleau-Ponty, humans share this embodied existence with other animals. While it is commonly accepted that nonhuman animals feel joy and suffer, it was long thought that they are not capable of suffering from depression because they lack the necessary sophisticated cognitive and emotional capacities. Recent studies in the fields of animal cognition, emotion, and cultures (Bekoff, Minding Animals ; Smuts) challenge this view of animal minds and moods, and show that differences between humans and other animals are of degree and not kind. This raises the question of whether or not they suffer from depression, too, and how humans can find out. In order to conceptualize depression in humans, Aho focuses on first person narratives that rely on human language. The fact that other animals usually do not speak in human language makes this type of research into their minds and moods impossible. Humans can however witness their behaviors and despair, and in certain instances compare these to humans’. Nonhuman animal depression . Recent years have seen an increase in the study of nonhuman animal emotions and minds (Bekoff, Minding Animals ), but depression in Eva Meijer -- The Melancholic Animal — On Depression and Animality 112 nonhuman animals has not been studied much. Certain symptoms of depression, however, have been studied, and we know that chronic anxiety, aggressiveness, sleep problems, helplessness, and lethargy are found in a wide range of species (see Peña- Guzmán for an overview). Many nonhuman animals suffer from conditions that can be compared to human psychiatric disorders, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, or certain personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder ( ibid.; see also Braitman). Nonhuman animal mental disorders are often treated with drugs intended for human use; companion animals and captive animals that suffer from anxiety or depression are, for example, treated in the US with human antidepressants like Prozac. The fact that these are effective is taken as proof of the animal subjects' depression. Many nonhuman animals display behaviors that are self- injurious and self-destructive. In a discussion of nonhuman animal suicide, David M. Peña-Guzmán argues that differences between human and nonhuman animal suicide should be understood along a continuum. Self-reflexive behavior is found not only in humans, he argues, but also in other animals, and is not an all or nothing case in humans, either. Different nonhuman animals have different types and degrees of subjective self-awareness, the breadth of which we often do not yet know. We do know that a great deal of empirical research supports this idea of continuity in animal capacities, in many fields, ranging from culture to language (Meijer, Political Animal Voices , chapter 2). Furthermore, ideas of rationality, self-consciousness, and free will in humans are also disputed, for different reasons. Peña-Guzmán points out, for example, that suicide is not only committed by reflexive subjects: young children have committed suicide, as well as humans who are considered to be non-rational.
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