A depressão como marca do mal-estar contemporâneo e sua relação com a experiência do tempo e da transitoriedade.

Abstract

Depression seems to represent one of the hegemonic forms of psychological suffering in contemporary times. The WHO data from 2018 shows that, worldwide, there are more than 300 million people of all age groups in depression. In the present study, we highlight the importance, beyond the psychopathological perspective, of placing the discourse on depression in the psychoanalytic field, from an ethical and political paradigm, on the subject's truth. Therefore, the general objective of this master's thesis was to investigate depression as a mark of contemporary discontent and its relation with the experiences of time and transience. The engine for this reflection was listening to Esther Greenwood, a character in the novel The Bell Jar, a work published in 1963 by the author Sylvia Plath. In view of this book, the methodological resource of this research was the construction of a clinical case, oriented at the elements of real that emerge in the experience and that question the proposed objective, allowing a theoretical articulation with what the literature presents, mainly in the figures of Freud and Lacan, in addition to other contemporary authors. Esther's story allowed us to point out depression as a condenser of current discontent, allowing us to glimpse fundamental questions of the human condition, such as subjective truth, loss, suicide and helplessness. Depression, like melancholy in Freud's day, was found to have a role in revealing central issues. It was also observed how the depressed subjects present themselves as resistant and as a product of the current neoliberal rationality which promotes a process of managing psychological suffering, imposing subjectivity on the business model. As a remnant of the operation, the depressed subject seems to present himself in a contrary position of the juissance’s imperatives of enjoyment and productivity, experiencing his own temporality, marked by a rejection of the race for self-improvement. We consider that the experience with life and death in these subjects also proves to be countercurrent, since the depressed subject, in his speeches, exposes finitude, the transience of all things, death as a possible horizon, directing this question to the ethical field about the ultimate meaning of existence. Finally, it is concluded that depression appears as a remnant or even an effect of the current subjectivation, at the same time that it reveals the impossibility of this rationality to apprehend for what is too human, in other words, the point most intimate of each subject, a place where imperatives give way and where listening is demanded.