Last week, at a meeting of my department’s graduate admissions committee, one of my colleagues was complaining about a particular applicant whose personal statement focused on being diagnosed with depression in the middle of college. “I hate it when they use depression as an excuse,” this colleague said. To which another one responded, “Depression is no excuse! Excuse, hell – it’s a prerequisite.”
There is a lot to say and wonder about the relation between depression, under its many definitions, and the kinds of work we do over the decades as feminists, as intellectuals and activists, as autobiographers, and as teachers. In the process of thinking about this talk, I’ve found myself juxtaposing some of the scenes of these activities, and some of their different languages, beginning maybe unexpectedly with the scenes of pedagogy. Even when we are not in our classrooms, after all, each of these roles involves us in multiple positions within a densely innervated matrix of generational transmissions. And if the reader of our first-person writing doesn’t have the immediacy of a face at our seminar table, we are all the likelier to endow her in our minds with the deeper pedagogical intimacy of our parent, our child, our mentors, our enemies, our past or future or alternative selves.
When I connect this pedagogical relation to the issue of depression, I have in mind the reflections of the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins on the depressive personality in the educator. I am also thinking of Melanie Klein’s related, but far from identical, notion of the depressive position. As far as I can tell, current popular thought seems to understand depression in terms of a kind of chronic natural gloominess, on the one hand, or alternatively as a completely exogenous malady, from who knows where, that is liable to descend on its unsuspecting host until heroically routed by medicine and positive mental hygiene. I have to say this version sounds very alien to me, even though it sometimes feels as though half of my conversation consists of urging other people to take antidepressants or find a shrink – in fact even though my little memoir, A Dialogue on Love, is an attempt to trace the course of a psychotherapy that I undertook to deal with longstanding depression.
Departing from these forms of common sense about depression, Silvan Tomkins, to the contrary, discusses depressiveness, or the depressive personality or script, as a durable feature of certain people’s way of being, a constitutive feature of their best aptitudes as well as disabilities, regardless of whether or not, at a given moment in life, they are experiencing depression. This makes much more sense to me – gets me further not only with depression itself, but with thinking, writing, and especially teaching. At some places in Tomkins, this depressiveness seems like a widespread and rather generalized state; at others, Tomkins gives it a specificity that itself seems quite autobiographical. For Tomkins, the most notable feature of the depressive, on emerging from childhood, is that he or she combines a passion for relations of mimetic communion – ideally, two-way or mutual mimesis, based on the sweetness and anxiety for the child of imitating and being imitated by an intermittently attentive adult – with an intense susceptibility to shame when such relations fail. This is a recipe both for overachievement in general and for pedagogical intensity in particular. Tomkins writes:
The depressive, like his parent before him, is not altogether a comfortable person for others with whom he interacts. As a friend or parent or lover or educator he is somewhat labile between his affirmations of intimacy and his controlling, judging, and censuring of the other. His warmth and genuine concern for the welfare of others seduces them into an easy intimacy which may then be painfully ruptured when the depressive . . . finds fault with the other. The other is now too deeply committed and too impressed with the depressive’s sincerity to disregard the disappointment and censure from the other and is thereby seduced further into attempting to make restitution, to atone, and to please the other. When this is successful, the relationship is now deepened, and future ruptures will become increasingly painful – both to tolerate and to disregard. So is forged the depressive dyad in which there is great reward punctuated by severe depression. The depressive creates other depressives by repeating the relationship which created his own character. The depressive exerts a great influence on the lives of all he touches because he combines great reward with punishment, which ultimately heightens the intensity of the affective rewards he offers others. . . . The depressive is concerned not only with impressing, with pleasing and exciting others through his own excellence, but also that others should impress him, should please him, and should excite him through their excellence. . . . (Tomkins 225)
Tomkins makes explicit, moreover, that in these depressive dramas our students are likely to oscillate between two roles. On the one hand they can function for us as “substitute parents who are to be impressed [and] excited” but whose “boredom, . . . censure, and . . . turning away constitute an enduring threat and challenge.” On the other hand, as they stand in for ourselves as children, we in the role of their parent will “censure [our] beloved children for their ignorance” and “love and respect them for their efforts to meet [our] highest expectations” (Tomkins 228-29, emphasis added). Or to recast the teaching situation in terms of a psychoanalytic encounter: sometimes I feel like my students’ analyst; other times, floundering all too visibly in my helplessness to evoke language from my seminar, I feel like a patient being held out on by 20 psychoanalysts at once.
