The Nature of Depression

by Arthur Janov, M.D.
www.primaltherapy.com

What is depression? It is another form of neurosis, not a separate disease. It is a repressed state. It occurs because any Pain that cannot be felt engenders an equal amount of repression to control it. The subjective experience is exhaustion, labored movement, a feeling of heaviness and futility, sighing and feeling "down." These are the results of an internal war where Pain is combating the forces keeping it from consciousness. The person feels repression at work though the subjective experience is depression. Depression is repression moved to a higher plateau. Depression, in and of itself, is not a feeling, it is the result of many feelings compacted and unexpressed.

Depression generally results when outside events render someone hopeless or without enough options to act out his neurosis. This hopelessness sets off the original feeling and the Pain begins to move toward consciousness. If the pain completed its circuit upward, there would be an acute feeling of anxiety and perhaps impulsive acting out; but what happens instead is inhibition. The Pain is pushed down automatically; the site of this downward thrust is the frontal lobe. This is the area which ingests ideas from parents and society which block feelings, impulses, desires, and needs. It is the neural center for guilt, self-discipline, rigidity and inflexibility. It is the major site of behavioral inhibition, an inhibition that eventually can lead to depression. It is almost certainly the area of Freud's "superego."

The impulsive person who acts "out" and the depressive who acts "in" are not suffering from two separate diseases but have two distinct ways of dealing with the same Pain. The one who acts out merely has less effective frontal inhibition. This can be due to a number of reasons but generally is because of the immense, compounded firstand second-line Pains.

It follows, then, that whatever decreases or attenuates frontal lobe activation will help ease depression. Frontal lobotomy, severing the connection from the frontal area to lower structures, absolutely stops depression. To put it another way, depression and thoughts of suicide require a high level of frontal brain activity. You can't have either inhibition or thoughts of suicide without a certain level of brain development. Depressive cycles usually begin in the late teens after the third level has been solidified and a maturational leap has taken place from the child to the adult brain. The adult brain is not merely a larger one but is qualitatively different from the child's. If one were looking for the superego of Freud, one would have to wait until the teens- not between the ages of six and eight, as he thought. It is only in the later teens that we could locate the superego in the frontal section of the brain, the neural basis for depressions.

Any substance which acts as a metabolic poison-alcohol, barbiturates, and carbon monoxide-will decrease repression and therefore depression. Electroshock is also a means of combating depression. As a massive blow to the brain, it literally shuts down consciousness while radically increasing serotonin supplies. It prevents the retrieval of memory and, in so doing, prevents access to Pain. There is yet another way that third-level cognitive function can be manipulated and that is if the depressive turns to mystical, religious, or other "in-group" dogmas. The energy of feelings can flow outward so that the person feels lighter and less depressed. This energy becomes attached fanatically to a series of ideas which offer relief. The same pressure is at work but now there is an outlet. Indeed, the expressions of almost any feeling helps depression. Both rage and crying are helpful cathartics.

This has probably led to the common theory that depression is a matter of rage turned inward, involving self-hate and self-loathing.

Depression is going to be compounded, clearly, when the outlets in one's early childhood are severely limited and where the general atmosphere is exceptionally repressive-in strict schools, rigid churches, and a family life that carefully circumscribes every move the child makes. If the child's head is filled with inhibitions, warnings, and prohibitions almost every minute of his life, sooner or later he's going to suspect his own feelings and impulses. That is the beginning of real "self-hate" where the ideational or cognitive mind cannot tolerate the feeling one. The denied feeling self becomes addicted to alcohol and drugs, and the intellectual self hates the addicted one. The self that is hated, paradoxically, is the one that needs so much, and so the person comes to hate his needs.

The difference between an acutely anxious person and a depressive is that the anxious person has less effective gates against Pain. The anxious one has more access to the frantic anguished component of the Pain. In fact, the very anxious person and the depressive are often dealing with exactly the same breakthrough of first-line Pain but the difference is that the depressive can contain it. He constantly feels the pressure of the Pain, even though he cannot delineate it.

Depression is an accumulated sadness, a summation of all the little hurts that have never been expressed. Confusion is an important part of this syndrome because the motivating forces cannot be singled out. It is as if one were presented with all of one's past all at once.

It seems paradoxical to say that the treatment for depression is Pain. But it is a fact. The experience of Primal Pain is the best antidote for depression.

Arthur Janov founded a school of therapy
he calls Primal Therapy.

To read more on Arthur Janov and Primal Therapy,
visit the Primal Therapy web site here.

Talk about it:
info@livereal.com

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