“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.” Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Amiel’s Journal Depression is the darkest of human experiences. It saps our energy, weakens our will to work, destroys our desire to socialize, decreases our motivation to exercise, and sometimes even jeopardizes our […]
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You desire to know the art of living, my friend.
It is contained in one phrase, make use of suffering.
Depression is the darkest of human experiences.
It saps our energy, weakens our will to work, destroys our desire to socialize, decreases our motivation to exercise, and sometimes even jeopardizes our will to live.
When depressed, the future looks hopeless and our self turns into the heaviest of burdens.
Perhaps the most pernicious thing about depression is that when caught in its grip, it can seem as if there is no way out and no value to the experience.
But as we will explore in this video, hidden in the darkness of depression is a psychological treasure which can facilitate self transformation.
Depression is not necessarily pathological, wrote Carl Jung.
It often foreshadows a renewal of the personality or a burst of creative activity.
There are moments in human life when a new page is turned to one of the ways modern psychologists try to understand and treat depression is by isolating its cause.
The ending of a relationship, a failed business, the death of a loved one, loneliness, poverty, trauma, or biological, genetic or chemical predispositions are some of the many causes which psychologists fixate on.
The swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that facilitating healing was best accomplished not by focusing on the cause of a depression, but on the telos that is the purpose, end, or goal a depression is aiming at.
Depressions always have to be understood teleologically, wrote Carl Jung.
Or as the psychologist Edward Ettinger wrote, if you have a dynamic understanding of the nature of the psyche, you will realize, as Jung tells us, that depression, like all other psychological symptomatology, has a telos at its core, a latent purpose, if one can understand it purposefully.
While the purpose of a depression differs among individuals in general, a depression can be conceived as the psyches attempt to elicit some sort of dramatic change, be it a reorganization of life following a loss, a change in a conscious attitude which has grown stale, or the discovery of unrealized aspects of the personality that one needs in order to rise to the challenges of life in the road less traveled.
M.
Scott Peck since patients are not yet consciously willing or ready to recognize that the old self, in the way things used to be, are outdated, they are not aware that their depression is signaling that major change is required for successful and evolutionary adaptation.