Depression : affect central de la modernité

Since the end of the 20th century depression is a very widespread diagnosis in the field of mental health. Anyone, at any time of their life, can call themselves depressed. However, this "continuistic" clinical category conceals very different clinical registers. For psychoanalysis, depression is not a biological illness, nor is it a symptom, but an affect. It stems from a difficulty in the subject, of making the signifier resonate wit jouissance, to conjugate the symbolic with the real. It signals a disconnection from discourse and thus from the social link. Depression is closely linked with anxiety because a depressive state expresses the subject's recoiling from anxiety and the emergence of the object that causes his desire. Unanchored from this object, the subject can no longer saturate his jouissance with his symptom. Only a differential diagnosis of depressive states allows for a clinical practice that takes the structure of each subject into account. The compass of this clinic of the depressive affect is 'the object cause of desire', to be distinguished from the object of desire. Far from the objective of normalisation, the psychoanalytic treatment of subjects said to be 'depressed' in the modern discourse, rather values every person's potential, aiming towards original solutions, specific to each subject.