There are forms of suffering that scream, and others that remain silent. Depression often belongs to the latter. It does not always arrive in the form of tears, despair, or words of pain. Sometimes it arrives quietly: a person continues to get up in the morning, go to work, reply to messages, smile when necessary, yet something inside them has stopped finding colour in the world.

Life continues. It is desire that seems to have stopped.

Perhaps this is why depression can be so difficult to understand from the outside. The observer sees a person who apparently has reasons to live. The person who is suffering may look at exactly the same things and be unable to experience them as sufficient reasons to desire life.

It is not necessarily a matter of not wanting to live.

Often, it is a matter of no longer being able to feel life within the life one is living.

When the World Loses Its Light

Psychoanalysis has never offered a single explanation for depression, nor should it. What we call depression may correspond to very different psychic experiences. There are depressions related to mourning, loss, trauma, guilt, aggression turned against the self, early experiences of abandonment, the collapse of ideals, or a profound difficulty in feeling real.

There are also biological, social, and relational dimensions that cannot be ignored.

Psychoanalysis, however, adds a fundamental question to the description of symptoms:

What does this suffering mean for this particular person?

Two people may present similar symptoms while psychologically living through completely different stories.

• One may be mourning someone.
• Another may be mourning the person they wished they had become.
• Another, the love they never received.
• Another, the childhood they never had.
• Another, a future they imagined for years and suddenly realise will never happen.

Because we do not lose only people.

We lose places, relationships, possibilities, versions of ourselves, projects, dreams, bodies, youth, imagined families, and futures we once believed were guaranteed.

And some of the most painful losses are precisely those for which there is no funeral.

Freud: The Shadow of the Object

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud establishes a distinction that remains extraordinarily fruitful.

In mourning, we generally know what we have lost. The world becomes poorer because someone or something has disappeared from it.

In melancholia, the question becomes more complex.

There may be a loss that the subject cannot fully represent. They may know whom they have lost, but not fully understand what they have lost in that person.

And then something decisive happens: what belonged to the relationship with the lost object is displaced onto the ego itself.

The anger that could not be directed towards the other returns against the self.

Accusation becomes self-accusation.

Disappointment becomes a feeling of worthlessness.

Conflict with the other becomes a conflict within oneself.

The person says:

“I am worthless.”

“I am a failure.”

“I am a burden.”

“I ruin everything.”

But psychoanalysis asks: Whose voice is this?

Who first spoke to you this way?

To whom did this accusation originally belong?

What relationship has been internalised?

What loss is hidden within this violence directed against the self?

Depression can turn the subject simultaneously into the accused, the prosecutor, and the court.

And the trial seems never to end.

Melanie Klein: Love, Guilt, and Reparation

With Melanie Klein, we enter even more deeply into the territory of love and darkness.

Klein understood that loving someone also means recognising our dependence on that person. And recognising dependence means admitting that the loved object has enormous power over us.

From very early on, love and aggression coexist.

We love and we hate.

We desire closeness and we want distance.

We need the other and resent that need.

In what Klein called the depressive position, a fundamental transformation takes place: we begin to realise that the object we love and the object we hate are the same person.

The good mother and the frustrating mother are not two different mothers.

They are the same mother.

And from this integration emerges a profoundly human experience: guilt.

If the person I attacked in my fantasy is also the person I love, then the fear arises that I may have destroyed them.

But Klein does not end with guilt.

Reparation also emerges.

The desire to care.

To rebuild.

To create.

To love again.

Perhaps this is why creativity can have such a profound relationship with depressive experiences. To create can symbolically become a way of repairing the internal world.

• Writing.
• Painting.
• Teaching.
• Caring.
• Cooking.
• Planting.
• Building.
• Loving.

These are different ways of saying:

“I can still put something alive into the world.”

Winnicott: When Living No Longer Feels Real

Winnicott takes us in another direction.

For him, there are forms of suffering that cannot be explained solely by the loss of a loved object. Some people seem to suffer from something even more primitive: a fragility in the very experience of existing.

They function.

They adapt.

They meet expectations.

But they do not truly feel that they are living.

Here we encounter the problem of the false self.

A child who has had to adapt excessively to the environment may learn very early to become what others need them to be.

• Obedient.
• Competent.
• Caring.
• Excellent.
• Available.
• Perhaps even admired.

Yet beneath this adaptation, a silent question may remain:

“Where am I in all of this?”

In this context, some depressive experiences may be understood not simply as sadness, but as a loss of vitality.

The person does not necessarily say:

“I am sad.”

They may say:

“I feel nothing.”

“Nothing matters to me.”

“I do things because I have to.”

“I no longer know what I like.”

“I do not recognise myself.”

There is an enormous difference between being biologically alive and feeling alive.

Depression Also Happens in the Body

A serious psychoanalytic reading should not turn everything into a symbol.

Depression is not merely a story we tell about childhood.

It is also the body.

• It is sleep.
• It is appetite.
• It is energy.
• It is movement.
• It is concentration.
• It is memory.
• It is sexuality.
• It is the capacity to experience pleasure.
• It is time itself being experienced differently.

For this reason, in certain situations, medical and psychiatric care and medication may be fundamental. Psychotherapy and medical treatment do not need to be adversaries. They may respond to different dimensions of the same suffering.

Reducing all depression to neurotransmitters impoverishes the person.

But reducing all depression to the unconscious does too.

The human being is simultaneously body, history, relationship, language, environment, and desire.

When the Future Disappears

Perhaps one of the cruellest experiences of depression is the alteration of our relationship with time.

The past becomes enormous.

The present becomes heavy.

And the future disappears.

A depressed person may be unable to imagine that what they feel today could ever be different.

Pain presents itself as eternal.

Not because the person rationally knows that it will last forever, but because emotionally they have lost the capacity to imagine anything else.

It is like being inside a dark room and forgetting that the house has windows.

In this sense, therapeutic work does not consist of saying:

“Cheer up.”

“Think positively.”

“Look at everything you have.”

Such phrases may increase loneliness because they add guilt to suffering.

The work may begin with something far more modest:

being with someone inside what cannot yet be resolved.

Presence Before Interpretation

There are moments when interpreting too soon can become another form of abandonment.

A deeply depressed person does not always immediately need to know why they are depressed.

Sometimes they first need to experience that someone can remain in the presence of their pain without running away, moralising, minimising it, or demanding a rapid recovery.

Before interpretation, there may need to be connection.

Before explanation, presence.

Before searching for meaning, perhaps we need to create the conditions in which meaning can once again emerge.

This is where Winnicott becomes particularly valuable.

A good-enough environment does not eliminate all pain.

It provides the conditions in which pain can be experienced without completely destroying the continuity of being.

Not Romanticising the Darkness

There is, however, an essential caution.

We should not romanticise depression.

Suffering does not automatically make someone deeper, more creative, or wiser.

Depression can destroy relationships, interrupt education, remove people from work, affect the body, and make even the most basic acts of everyday life extremely difficult.

In severe cases, the person’s safety must take precedence over any theoretical elegance.

• There are moments for interpretation.
• There are moments for listening.
• There are moments for mobilising family and support networks.
• There are moments for seeking medical or psychiatric assessment.
• And there are situations of risk in which urgent intervention is necessary.

No loyalty to a therapeutic school should ever be more important than the concrete life of a human being.

Of Love and Darkness

Why, then, speak of love when we speak of depression?

Because many depressions carry the history of our bonds.

• We suffer because we loved.
• Because we needed.
• Because we lost.
• Because we were not loved in the way we needed to be.
• Because we were loved in ways that also wounded us.
• Because we were afraid of losing what we loved.
• Because, sometimes, we turn against ourselves the violence we could not direct towards those upon whom we depended.

But it is also through relationships that something may begin again.

The therapeutic relationship does not replace all the love that was missing. It does not magically rewrite childhood. It does not bring back the dead. It does not undo trauma.

But it can offer a new experience:

• To be heard without having to perform.
• To be accompanied without having to earn it.
• To be sad without immediately being corrected.
• To feel anger without necessarily losing the other person.
• To fail without ceasing to exist for someone.
• To depend without being humiliated.
• To be able, slowly, to desire again.

Perhaps the way out of darkness does not begin when someone teaches us to love life.

Perhaps it begins much earlier than that.

It begins when, in the midst of darkness, a small experience of connection appears.

• A conversation.
• An encounter.
• A person.
• A word.
• A gesture.
• A morning when we wake up carrying slightly less weight.
• A piece of music that touches us again.
• A meal that begins to have flavour again.
• An almost imperceptible desire to do something tomorrow.

Small events that may seem insignificant to someone looking from the outside, but which can represent something immense:

the world has begun to call us back again.

Psychoanalysis may not promise to eliminate darkness forever.

But it can help us discover what exists within it.

• The losses we have not yet mourned.
• The anger we transformed into guilt.
• The voices we mistook for our own.
• The impossible loves from which we are still expecting something.
• The parts of ourselves we abandoned in order to be loved.

And perhaps, after crossing some of these territories, we may come to understand that psychological health does not mean living permanently in the light.

It also means knowing that night exists without believing that everything is night.

Because between love and darkness there is still a third possibility:

connection.

And sometimes it is through connection that the person slowly begins to return to the world, to others, and finally, to themselves.