Depressing time: waiting, melancholia, and the psychoanalytic practice of care

Abstract

Although in this chapter pays close attention to existential claims about the place of waiting in human experience, it suggests that waiting is significantly shaped by the promises and narratives of particular historical moments and lifeworlds, and their distinct ways of understanding time. The chapter uses a more dispersed, eclectic, and textual archive of experience to open up a theoretical account of melancholia/depression as a condition fundamentally entangled with existential, cultural, and socio-historical experiences and theorisations of European modernity. By highlighting this link between the chronicity of the mind and the broader psychosocial contexts in which endurance plays out, the chapter opens up a historically nuanced sense of the value of psychoanalytic temporal practices of waiting not for but with. It also suggests that by attending specifically to the relationships between depression, temporality, and historical and psychosocial experience, the urgent debates about uses of time in contemporary mental healthcare delivered by the UK’s National Health Service might tentatively be reframed.