Sneezing root grass is said to cure melancholy.
(B02 version above)
Let the melancholy be liberated
Today, melancholy no longer seems to be beautiful, it is not just a pathology, but a real "disease". Modern psychiatry has given melancholy the names "Mania" and "Depression."
However, melancholy as a psychological construct is not exhausted by pathological language. As Zheng Shengxun puts it: "We want to see melancholy as a life we experience ourselves, historical, cultural, political, and melancholy with its own meaning." "Writing about melancholy is not only about overcoming trauma, or being drowning and depressed, but also about recreating the repressed, obscured, and transformed voids of cultural history. Zheng Shengxun understands it as an emotional investment of the subject, an understanding and practice, which may have positive and creative energy.
Psychoanalytic theory deals with "the melancholy of the subject" on a personal level. Outside of Freud, two female theorists, Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva, offer different insights. Klein's study of "melancholy" is based on her understanding of the psychological formation of children: adult mourning and melancholy, a retrospective of the experience of separation from the mother as a baby. Kristiva, on the other hand, sees melancholy as a "symbolic fragility" in the human psyche that can make our minds more flexible.
In addition, there is a "historical melancholy". In his Compendium of the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin, borrowing the melancholy image of the "new angel," proposes a view of historical redemption: the angel faces the ruins of the past, but is blown by the wind of progress to the future to which he is facing. In his view, the driving force for men and women to rise up and revolt is not the dream of liberated descendants, but the memory of oppressed ancestors—this is the melancholy and mourning of history.
Mourning the lost is also the greatest hope for the future. Contemporary theorist Judith Butler in "After The Loss, Then What?" The article responds to the complexity of people's exposure to "time" and "history.". She offered to face the melancholy solemnly and mourn with a special place. Because in the "loss", the suffering, violence, and stigma we have endured are inscribed, and mourning can give the subject combat effectiveness and initiative. Melancholy, which seems personal and inward on the surface, can actually be political, an encounter between the flesh and politics.
How did depression become an epidemic?
Although we have many beautiful theories about melancholy in literature and philosophy, in any case, the melancholy that has been judged by society and the medical system to be depressed has now been labeled negatively. Once part of the elite, depression is democratized as an equal disease. On the one hand, depression is diagnosed as the disease of the times in the 21st century, and on the other hand, people are rushing to tell each other and rush to clarify many misconceptions about depression.
Of course, in addition to depression, we also have various mental troubles, such as ADHD, borderline personality disorder or fatigue syndrome, which dominate the form of disease in the early 21st century. In addition, there are a large number of unnamed emotions that plague young people in anxious times. This makes "selling anxiety" also become a way for many merchants to make money.
But today's anxiety isn't just "marketing" catalyzed, it's also plaguing psychologists. Lu Xiaoya, a lecturer at Beijing Normal University on "Life and Death in Images", once pointed out in her speech that there is a universal "sense of meaninglessness in life" in this era; Xu Kaiwen, associate professor of psychology at Peking University, has also aroused widespread concern about the analysis of the phenomenon of "hollow heart disease" in the younger generation. Xu Kevin believes that "hollow heart disease" is a new type of existential anxiety that has emerged clinically in the past three or four years and has become prominent in young people. Interpreting this anxiety in terms of traditional psychotherapeutic thinking is ineffective, because this generation of young people has no obvious trauma, seems to be fine, and is very good, but they are "deeply troubled, can't find the value of life, and can't live their true selves." ”
The philosopher Han Bingzhe's explanation of "mental violence" responds to this situation in a sense. In his view, the psychopathological forms of the 21st century no longer conform to the logic of immunology: they are not infectious diseases, but obstructions; they are not caused by a negative, immunological other, but from an overdose of certainty. This violence, which stems from affirmation, comes from its kind and from within the system— which he describes as a "meritocracy" and a "burnout society." The reason why modern depression occurs is, in a sense, the self-attack triggered by modern people who firmly believe that "nothing cannot be done" after encountering failure.
Meritorious society, creating depressed patients
What is meritocracy? In a merit-oriented society, people respond with "excessive activity, hysterical labor, and production to a naked and extremely fleeting life." The whole world is full of positivity, everyone is told to "live actively", to achieve self-fulfillment with effort, and failure is not allowed – because that can only be the result of not being positive enough and not working hard enough.
When people pursue the "absolutely achievable" dream with a high degree of exaltation, the merit society gradually moves towards a "stimulant society", and human beings tend to evolve into a "performance machine". The problem, however, is that "vitality of life," which was originally a very complex phenomenon, is now increasingly being "reduced to vigorous movements and flourishing performance outcomes." This attitude leads to anxiety and hysteria, as well as excessive burnout and exhaustion, without being able to reach the other side of oneself.
If the disciplined society in foucault's sense is dominated by negativity, creating madmen and criminals; then on the contrary, the merit society that Han Bingzhe said creates depressed people and world-weary people. In today's free society, people are caught up in a new spiritual discipline - the person who pursues merit fights against himself, and he must constantly surpass himself, thus falling into a destructive pressure. It's a form of self-exploitation, disguised as a form of freedom, more stealthy and more efficient because it comes from intrinsic drive, not external coercion. The exploiter is also the exploited, "more seriously than the exploitation of others, self-exploitation leads to self-collapse", "this exploitation ends in death." ”
Therefore, it is not enough to look at depression from the perspective of self-management, not only because people cause depression themselves, but also because of the lack of interpersonal relationships, which also aggravates the prevalence of depression. Han Bingzhe describes this exhausted self as Burn-out-Syndrom, which is a tired, burned-out mind in which people not only fail to achieve freedom, but lose their contemplative happiness.
Tired of social loneliness
"The gods are tired, the eagles are tired, and the wounds are healed in tiredness."
Many times, burnout has a healing function. On a lazy and weary afternoon, "doing nothing" can inspire wild fantasies. Fatigue syndrome, however, is an overly positive burnout in which the ego burns itself out in an excessive frenzy. Overactivity is both a sign of mental exhaustion and a general distraction, which deprives us of the ability to do things.
The fatigue of the meritorious society is also a kind of lonely exhaustion. The writer Peter Handke wrote in On Burnout: "Two people are inevitably separated from each other and fall into a highly personal burnout, not our burnout, but me and yours." ”
This sense of burnout is a form of violence that drains our language abilities and hearts. It destroys communities, collectives and intimacy, and even the language itself. People lose the ability to see, fall silent, and only the self occupies the entire field of vision. For the "working animals", the richness of "life" is reduced to "survival", and survival leads to the fanatical worship of health, because we have no time to take care of the mind.
For us, the festival of Japan should be a kind of rest. Yet, as many theorists have discovered, we live today in an era when there are no festivals, because all festivals have been occupied by the carnival of consumption and shopping. The existence of people is integrated into the network woven by commodity relations, and the relationship between people becomes a commercial relationship - the social marketing and "carrying goods" big V that exist on the circle of friends and Weibo are also the same reason.
Escaping from the department store-like world and recreating a true festival is a way to find the true rhythm of life. Han Bingzhe advocates that we should return from the burnout in the face of the world to the burnout that faces the self. For example, immerse oneself in a continuous, creative "deep boredom" and enjoy a truly focused contemplative life, because "in a state of contemplation one is able to detach oneself from oneself and immerse oneself in things." In addition, the return from "me and yours" to "ours", allowing people to pay attention to each other and rebuilding a close neighborly society, is also a key to dispelling melancholy.