Goodbye, Darkness The new science of exuberance.
By Peter D. Kramer
What does the good life feel like? I mean the life worth living, the life we should and do admire. For most of the last century, that question was answered in terms derived from the study of depression, schizophrenia, and the anxiety disorders. A person in touch with the times would suffer existential angst and social anomie. To be wise was to experience ambivalence about important matters and to feel alienated from the culture.
If I am reading the tea leaves right, our fascination with emotional paralysis may be nearing an end. Philip Fisher, a literary scholar at Harvard, recently made the case for "the vehement passions" in a book of that title. Fisher is referring to emotions dear to the ancient Greeks—anger, pride, obstinacy, and rashness.
The passions are precisely not modern. Those who hold them lack double-mindedness; their perspectives are not tinged with irony. Passionate grief, for example, leads to bold action. Think of Electra or Antigone; think of Achilles roused to battle with Hector.
Of course, melancholics have always written in praise of a simplicity that they could not attain—while secretly taking pride in their own inner complexity. But we seem now to have entered an era in which intellectuals praise whole-heartedness and mean it wholeheartedly. Our aesthetics have undergone a sea change....
My suspicion is that the new enthusiasm for simple, positive emotions is a matter of ideology following technology. Toward the start of his career, Freud wrote that the aim of his procedure was to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness. This comment was mostly a quip about the human condition, but it speaks also to a frequent outcome in psychotherapy—the termination of an acute episode of mood disorder, followed by a modest amelioration of a chronic handicapping state. Until 10 or 15 years ago, a treatment that turned a major depression into a minor one was deemed a complete success.
But subsequent research found that even low-level residual symptoms carry substantial risk—of recurrent mood disorder, of suicide, and of other illnesses, such as heart disease. In the depressed, at least, personality traits that resemble symptoms look ever more like indicators of ongoing, progressive illness. These clinical findings bear an ominous relationship to research that links depression to concrete pathology—atrophy and disorganization of neurons in relevant parts of the brain.
At the same time, the occasional marked response to pharmacology, or to a combination of medication and psychotherapy, gives hints of what constitutes full recovery from depression. Remitted, major depression looks not like minor depression, but like energy, vitality, and resilience in full measure.
In this context, emotional paralysis loses much of its glamour. To the extent that angst, anomie, alienation, and ambivalence have a bad name, the vehement passions will have a good one. My impression is that books like Exuberance signal a turn in direction—a change in tastes and values—away from modern ideals of longing and brooding and toward post-postmodern (which is to say antique) ideals of fulfillment and adventure.
Observing this shift, we may mourn what is lost, in terms of respect for emotional complexity. At the same time, we may acknowledge that the change is overdue. The centuries-long romance with depression—what was that about?
(Peter D. Kramer is the author of Listening to Prozac and Spectacular Happiness. His new book about depression will be published next year.)
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Carl
"Who among us does not love Lambert Field?"