Estados depressivos neuróticos e suas relações com o desejo : um estudo psicanalítico

Abstract

Depression has become one of the main forms of suffering in contemporary society, leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to state that by 2020 depression will be the leading cause of disability. It is considered more harmful than angina, arthritis, asthma and diabetes, with the expectation that, reaching 2030, it will have become the most common disease in the world. This alarm has gone off in the general media, in major newspapers and journals in various areas of health and human sciences. It does not seem to go unnoticed that the modern man suffers from a malaise that discourages and even paralyzes him. Given the paralysis expressed by depression and based on the Freudian assumption that desire is what we can call the psychic apparatus in motion, this study aimed at investigating the relationship between depressive neurotic forms present in contemporaneity and desire. This is presented in a study that touches the Freudian clinic and its fundamental concepts and addresses the functioning of the psychic apparatus and metapsychology. In it, we suggest that depression participates in a new libidinal economy nowadays. Contemporary depressive individuals have been increasingly characterized by withdrawal from the inherently human struggles, taking refuge in an increasingly paralyzed and self-protected position, which is more characteristic of inhibitions than of symptomatic formations. Regarding narcissism, neurotic depressive persons appear to be more imprisoned in timeless narcissism than their neurotic counterparts, thus losing touch with the transience and lack that are necessary parts of desire. Often, this is due to what we describe as a flattening of the psychic time required for the psychological work of fulfilling the lack of satisfaction, which is found in the "superfulfillment" of maternal demands. Alongside this phenomenon, contemporary organizations corroborate to this state of affairs by so overrating the importance of happiness that there remains little room for randomness and the suffering of human existence. Finally, we sought to shed light on the analytical treatment for such patients, protecting the practice with the word as the prime instrument of psychoanalysis.