DEPRESSION (a short excerpt from my psychoanalytical essays)


Depressed and anxious people often don’t know why they feel that way, or why others needlessly seem to hurt them, and make them feel wounded and miserable. The reason why we feel that way – leaving aside our genetically inherited temperament – is that we may unconsciously be reliving a situation that goes back to our childhood.

We involuntarily do so. It is a fixation. Without insight about where it started, we really can’t help it. Our perception of others – and of our world, for that matter – is to some extent coloured by our youthful experiences and the way those experiences once made us feel. We unwittingly repeat those scenarios over and over. Hence the psychoanalytical truisms that under stress we unwittingly regress (return) to the past, and relive it, or recreate it, without being aware that we are doing so. Analytical insight may bring this to light.

The unconscious compulsion to repeat can be so strong, in fact, that if our adult life does not resemble the past, we sometimes unknowingly ­ –  and often disastrously  –  wreck our life by unwittingly recreating the life we once knew as a child. A woman whose father was an alcoholic, for example, will be prone to falling in love with an alcoholic whom she will then fruitlessly seek to reform. A man whose father was abusive and hit him, will tend to display that same behaviour to his wife and children.

Further to the brief note above, a great deal more can of course be said. Hopefully it will steer some readers in the right direction.


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