DEPRESSION , . AUTISM

and

Other . States . of . Despair

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings in this article.

I list the unconscious ideas that maintain the depressions.

 

Guilt-based depression

In this form the depression originates from infancy trauma. Infancy trauma is my name for psychological trauma that occurs in the first years of childhood. This distress occurs when the stresses and negative states of mind of the parents’ own lives are transmitted to the fledgling ego of the infant. Trauma is the infant’s reaction to its negative interpretation of its parental relationships (whether this interpretation is true or false is not important – the effect is the same either way). It feels that it has been rejected by the parents and so blames itself. [³]

States of mind like depression are maintained by unconscious ideas. To work out the underlying idea or concept, the overall theme or motif of the mood needs to be considered, that is, what the mood is trying to express. The theme of guilt is self-punishment. The theme of the depression goes a step more negative and becomes self-denigration.

The unconscious idea of the depression is :

I am a transgressor

I am a sinner

Jealousy-based depression

In this form the depression originates from alienation. [4]. One way of understanding alienation is that it represents the sense of degradation – there is no feeling of nobility in one’s life or in one’s relationships. Whence one cannot take any pride in what one does. This form is the depressive component of manic depression. The depression need not always be followed by mania – mania is an optional extra. Mania was usually prevalent in me when I had to work in jobs that I did not like, but gradually faded to being just a minor nuisance after I left such jobs (that is, as the sense of alienation decreased, so too the intensity of mania decreased in tandem). The theme of manic depression is victimisation.

The unconscious idea of the depression is :

I am a victim

Self-pity based depression

In this form the depression originates from the feeling that the person is being treated unfairly. The person experiences sorrow and punishment even though he is doing his best. The aspect of justice that is focused on is equity or fairness.

The unconscious idea of the depression is :

There is no justice in life

This form of depression may be experienced by people who are subject to political manipulation : for example, by asylum seekers who are rejected, on grounds of political expediency, by the government of the country that they flee to.

Differences

I list some differences between the forms. What complicates the identification of the two main forms is that guilt and jealousy can run into each other. The self-pity mode of guilt can lead, in a man, to preferring women who are mother figures and then to the self-pity mode of jealousy (when the mother figure changes to a sexual figure).

Guilt-based depression

This form of depression produces the severance from all desire for power, and focuses on the sense of personal unworthiness. Unworthiness is especially emphasised when it relates to one’s sexual escapades or to greed. I become aware of my failure to be the person that I would like to be. The depression denotes the failure of idealism and sometimes follows a mood of resentment or bitterness. I can easily feel overwhelmed by life ; to surmount this debility I emphasise perfection of character and of work. In this form of depression (as well as in the form produced by self-pity) I find it impossible to study – guilt knocks out intellectual concerns.

Jealousy-based depression

This form of depression is a less intense form than that produced by guilt, as well as being usually the more predominant form. It focuses on the failure to be like other people, on my failure to be sociable. Hence it is mainly my social experiences and social memories that induce this form of depression. To cope with it I may become homely. Or I may adopt duty as my preferred kind of morality ; duty more easily enables the person to survive depression – this is more certain to be the case when the person adopts a rigid timetable of work, as with, for example, the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer.

One way of trying to escape from this type of depression is to switch the focus of jealousy (mode of self-pity) into sexual desire. If this does not fully succeed then sexual desire and depression are concocted together to generate a depressive sexual passion. Such depressive passion leads to a dullness and narrowness in character. Conversely, problems with jealousy (in self-pity mode), such as the failure of sexual desire to produce happiness, easily lead to depression. Many such problems are caused by the attempt to use sexual desire as a means of establishing a sense of personal identity.

Self-pity based depression

In this form of depression there is primarily a feeling of passivity. The rejection of personal development may also be generated. If life or destiny is unfair then there is no point in trying to attune to any source of spirituality, since such spirituality lacks the fairness that I seek. Spirituality, as a goal, has no appeal to me whilst I am depressed.

Violence

Depression can lead to violence. The different forms use different strategies for expressing or directing violence. The object that the violence is directed towards is not the same for all forms. In jealousy-based depression the violence is projected externally onto society in order to refute my yielding to victim status, which I do not deserve. The depression that arises from guilt produces internal violence : I project violence onto my own self-image, since I must deserve my offender status. The violence that comes from depressive self-pity is projected onto venerable traditions of authority and morality, which are seen only as oppressive systems of control and injustice.

The violence generates anger ; anger is used as a means of refuting the depression and the unconscious idea that maintains it. Both main types of depression (those of guilt and jealousy) make a person susceptible to anger, whether from another person or as an internal response to the depression itself.

If anger is generated as a response to guilt-based depression then I direct it at life, at fate, at god (more particularly, the concept that god is love). I may feel like kicking the furniture or breaking something ; I try to destroy the chains of materialism.

Jealousy-based depression easily arises as a response to another person’s anger, even if the anger is not directed at me. For example, just by sitting beside an angry person, as when I am on a bus, can generate depression in me (I absorb the anger through the aura). Now if I get angry I direct the anger at people. [4a]

If I use anger to escape from depressive self-pity then I become self-assertive at any price. I follow my own way through life, no matter what problems this attitude will create for me. I refuse help from other people. I sink or swim solely by my own efforts.

I turn to other sad states that I have experienced

Mourning

My mother died peacefully in her sleep in 1992. My self-analysis had brought up into my consciousness the depth of my love-hate relation to her. My self-analysis had made me aware of my intense level of subconscious hatred towards her. And my idealism wanted me to transcend that hatred. She died before that goal was achieved.

Now at her death I went into a period of mourning that lasted many months. At first I just felt lost, lost in self-pity, the self-pity mode of jealousy. The pangs of jealousy and loneliness made me want to seek social company, so I walked around town every morning. I had no close friends – fortune does not permit that luxury to the explorer of the dark side of the mind. Loneliness is always an aspect of jealousy (mode of self-pity).

The jealousy slowly turned to guilt after a month. Now I experienced self-pity as a mode of guilt. I still cried as much, but now I regretted that I did not help mum enough during her last weeks. My guilt arose because my psycho-analysis had made me focus my hatred on her : abreaction had intensified my sensitivity to emotional turbulence, and insight into my childhood problems had brought the feelings of trauma into my awareness. [5]. My self-analysis did not permit me enough time to develop a loving relationship, which is what I had wanted above all else. At times the guilt made everything seem unreal, and I tried to intensify such feelings. I wanted to dissociate into unreality and oblivion. The pervasiveness of guilt was overwhelming. I just lay on my bed, engulfed in sorrow.

Eventually I began to alternate between guilt and jealousy, switching from one self-pity mode to the other one. When this happened my analytical mentality resurrected itself and I began to analyse my grief and my feelings of identification. The results prepared the ground for my idea of a person’s two identities that I formulated at a later time. [6]

During the periods of intense jealousy I began to have sporadic attacks of rheumatoid arthritis. Each attack focused on a different site, usually in my fingers and wrists, sometimes in my feet and elsewhere. I ignored these symptoms and they disappeared soon after the intensity of the jealousy ended, leaving only a residual weakness in my wrists.

The creation of this weakness has had a long-term effect : it has left me vulnerable to arthritic irritation during any spell of jealousy, in self-pity mode. To re-produce the arthritis the intensity of the jealousy need no longer be severe ; moderate intensities can now induce it. Therefore, when an illness symptom has been created by a dominant psychological mood, then that symptom can henceforth be activated by a much lesser intensity of the same mood.

In my self-analysis I worked through my problems of love and hate for mum. During the period of mourning I worked through the problem of identification with her. Now I have fond memories of her, without needing to deny her personal limitations. [7]

Mourning produces two issues for the family : that of love and hate, and that of identification. If the surviving kin cannot accept his past feelings of hatred for the deceased then he will end up hating himself. If he cannot release his feelings of jealousy then he may turn the deceased’s room into a mausoleum. If he cannot release his feelings of identification then he will narrow the possibilities of choice within personal relationships. The benefit of achieving a realistic image and memory of the deceased is that he will be able to form a better image of himself.

Internalisation of Emotions

The remaining states of despair described here feature the action of envy acting on another emotion. To understand this I need to explain what happens when an emotion is ‘internalised’. The particular point that I want to make is that when envy is internalised, it becomes destructive – in fact, envy is the most destructive of all emotions. It is the equivalent of Freud's ‘death instinct ’.

The binary process to internalisation is that of sublimation. In fact, sublimation is the successful culmination of the process of internalising emotions and desires and attitudes. These emotions or desires or attitudes I pack together under the term ‘mental states ’. [8]

When a person finds himself in a social situation where he is not allowed to express a particular emotion or desire or attitude then he has two choices : he can repress it or he can internalise it. What is the difference? Repression of a mental state is the attempt to remove it from consciousness ; repression is usually a subconscious action, though it can be done deliberately. The end result of repression can be neurosis.

For comparison, internalisation of a mental state is always a subconscious process, never a conscious one, and it produces a different effect. The person feels frustrated by the social prohibition forced on him and so disparages himself for being unable to assert himself ; he turns the forbidden mental state against himself. This is destructive. The end result of internalisation can be madness.

Conflict dreams illustrate these differences very well. When the dreamer dreams that he is being attacked, the attacking forces represent the mental states that have been turned against oneself – the attacking forces are the forbidden internalised mental states. Dreams of being attacked often produce physiological effects : the body heats up and may produce copious amounts of sweating. Regular occurrences of such dreams can produce loss of weight as body tissue is burned up by the heat – in my case I lost weight from my thighs, and have never been able to put it back on again. The heat is generated by the stimulation of fear. I store most of my fear in my thighs, so that is the reason that I lost weight from them. [9]

For comparison, repression produces dreams where the dreamer is trying to escape from prisons or confining situations : he wants to release his inhibited mental states. There are no noticeable physiological effects in dreams that accompany repression.

Any emotion can have either a good or a bad effect on a person, depending on the circumstances. When an emotion is internalised, the person always experiences the bad effect. In the emotional dynamics of the following states, envy is interacting with other emotions.

These interactions produce different ways of experiencing
the nadir of a human life.

Autism

Autism can be viewed as the inability to communicate at an emotional level. Hence it means the inability to have personal relationships that are founded on the sharing of emotion. Conversely, the lack of any desire for personal relationships indicates that some degree of autism is present. Mildly autistic people easily gravitate to solitary religion and eremitic meditation and yoga practice (this is not the only reason for following such practices – another common reason is the fear of personal relationships).

Much of my childhood indifference to the world indicated a lack of emotional contact with my parents. When some degree of emotional frigidity is present in the parents then it is likely to stimulate a corresponding degree of emotional deprivation in the child. He may then become an introvert when puberty increases the stresses on him.

Once the introverted child becomes an adult, friendships can become difficult to achieve. So there is a strong attraction in associating with an extrovert who can introduce him to a wide circle of acquaintances. The introvert - extrovert partnership is beneficial to both : in terms of life experience the extrovert has the breadth but the introvert has the depth.

In my 30s I tried to force mother to like me by aggressively helping her ; but she usually rejected such ‘help’. So the binary, or complementary, state of mind to autism is that of trying to force a person to love oneself.

It is easy to set up a vicious circle with autism. An emotionally unresponsive child may decide, when it is an adult, to withdraw from personal relationships. When that adult dies and later reincarnates back to Earth, then as a child he is likely to be even more unresponsive ; he will intensify his sensitivity to autism if the parents do not satisfy his emotional needs. If this disability recurs then, as an adult, he will find it even easier to withdraw from personal relationships. The only feasible escape route from this predicament is to go for intensity in life, so that any relationships that do occur for him have to be intense ones. If such relationships do not occur, or if they occur but are not successful, then the adult gradually travels the road to solitude.

From my 30s onwards, whenever my level of anxiety became very high in my work and social relationships the first casualty was the desire for any emotional contact. At a sufficiently high level of anxiety I always preferred to be alone – by retiring into solitude I prevented the possibility of people hurting me. This preference became highlighted during my self-analysis, since a deep analysis sensitises the person to his emotional weaknesses.

During my 40s, there was one day in particular that was a catastrophe for me. On that day I was flying high from the insights that my morning analysis had generated. Then disaster ! . When mother appeared she was sarcastic and fault-finding. My happiness was shattered. The damage to me was intense. I made the resolve never to have another emotional relationship with anyone again. My happiness always ended in pain. It took two and half years after the death of mother before I was confident enough to rescind this prohibition.

What are the emotional dynamics of autism ?
Each particular negative state of mind has its own emotional dynamics, which are the emotional factors that maintain the psychological symptoms of that state of mind.

Some authors that I read thought that the emotional dynamic of autism was guilt. This is not so. Guilt never produces the desire to avoid relationships. Such desire arises from the neutralisation of jealousy. Complete autism means that the child does not introject any emotions from other people. This may mean that it is not sufficiently and lovingly handled and touched by an adult : this is a problem that has been observed to occur in the long-term treatment of young infants in hospital. Mild autism means that the child has been denied the possibility of introjecting ‘good’ or positive emotions. [10]

The lack of social feeling in the child implies lack of jealousy : the need for social approval has been neutralised. [11]. The only emotion that is destructive enough to do this is envy. Envy, when it is internalised, is the most destructive of all emotions. Autism is the result of envy acting on and neutralising jealousy. The envy is the infant’s response to emotional neglect by adults. This response is facilitated if the infant had develop sensitivity in a previous incarnation. [12]

The emotional dynamics of autism are :

Autism = envy + jealousy (mode of self-pity)

The unconscious idea that creates autism is :

I do not want an emotional relationship with anyone

Oblivion

As I experienced it, the desire for oblivion means the desire to dis-integrate consciousness, or to detach oneself from consciousness. It means to desire the complete cessation of sentience and memory and awareness. It is the desire to dissolve into total nothingness. In a state of total nothingness no memory of the past exists, no awareness of the present exists. And therefore no pain or sorrow can ever be felt.

Oblivion represents the greatest intensity of self-destructiveness that can be desired, so it arises from the most intense psychic pain that can be experienced. (Psychic pain occurs when the psychological pain is so intense that it affects the structure of personal identity in some way). The only pain that is comparable to it is rapid-onset adult catatonia, when the desolation of the will is experienced instantaneously. As an instant event, the shock of desolation of the will is greater than the pain of oblivion, but when experienced over time, oblivion easily eclipses desolation.

Once the desire for oblivion was created in me, it became my favourite desire when psychic pain was intense. The desire to disintegrate consciousness represents the worst form of self-pity, and this is the self-pity mode of guilt. The utter need to destroy indicates the presence of envy. The combination produces a greater state of despair than either acting alone.

Therefore the emotional dynamic is :

Desire for oblivion = envy + guilt (mode of self-pity)

 

The unconscious idea that creates the desire for oblivion is :

I will never experience pain and sorrow ever again when I dissolve into nothingness

Suicide

The final years of my self-analysis kept me under an intense pressure of regular sorrow. So when I was not thinking about oblivion I ‘relaxed’ by merely thinking about suicide. My desire for suicide was an emotional response to my situation, and not an idealistic one (idealistic suicide represents an attitude such as ‘death before dishonour ’). This kind of desire for suicide indicates the greatest intensity of self-hate, and so represents self-hate as a mode of guilt. Again, the need to destroy indicates envy.

Therefore the emotional dynamic is :

Desire for suicide = envy + guilt (mode of self-hate)

Unlike religious people I do not regard suicide as a sin. A person has countless other lives to achieve what he fails to achieve in his present life. There is always another life to live.

There is nothing so wonderful about the material universe that it requires a tenacious grasp of life in a physical body. There is nothing so wonderful about existence that it overrides a life of pain. Nor does the drama of human evolution outweigh suicide, since death is merely the transition to another state of consciousness.

Death offers the opportunity for change which life denies.

Senility (or dementia)

I give an interesting speculation on a likely comparison to the desire for oblivion.

In the couple of years after my experience of instant catatonia in 1988 my mind was pre-occupied with the incessant psychic pain and the accompanying depression, both deriving mainly from guilt (usually in the mode of self-pity). Even by 1990 I was surprised by how much of the previous two years I had forgotten (I had to use my notes in order to remember). The pain created a mental ‘fog’ of intense anxiety in the mind, so that only highlights were remembered. When pain is continually focused on, little else is remembered.

In other words, incessant psychic pain has the effect of eliminating short-term memory.

Compare this consequence with senility, which in my view is very similar in some respects to oblivion. In senility the memory has vanished, so that the sense of reality of the ego is made dependent on the transient nature of the present moment. The ego can only feel the pain and the fear of the present ; the pain attached to the past is eliminated along with the memory. Oblivion carries this state one stage further, by eliminating the present as well.

In my view, self-pity is present in senility, but it is not a mode of guilt. Senility is not as bad as the desire for oblivion, so the inherent self-pity does not present itself as the self-pity mode of guilt. Nor is senility a problem with jealousy.

By comparison with oblivion I see

the emotional dynamics as being :

Senility = envy + self-pity

Effects on Memory
The reasons for abandoning memory and dissociating in some way from consciousness reflect the emotional mood that is dominant. The abandonment of memory in senility probably indicates that memory has become intertwined with a pervading sense of life’s unfairness. In the desire for suicide, the memory focuses primarily on personal failings. In the desire for oblivion, memory arouses only the sense of hopelessness.

As a summary, I list the effects of envy in this article.

When envy is internalised, it becomes Freud's ‘death instinct ’ (though it is not an instinct but a psychological predisposition).

When this envy acts on guilt, jealousy or self-pity it produces some terrible states of mind.

Black Ocean of Stillness

I finish this account of some forms of despair by recounting a state of mind that superficially seems to resembles oblivion, but is less extreme. Oblivion is the desire for the complete cessation of consciousness. A lesser extent of misery is denoted by the desire for the complete cessation of emotional conflict.

One night in the summer of 1997 I dreamt that I was looking on a black ocean of total stillness. In the dream I was observing a state of ceased emotional tumult. My feelings at that time were ones of extreme hatred and bitterness, especially towards the spiritual world that controlled my destiny and led me only ever into regular experiences of sorrow and karmic punishments for years on end.

The black ocean of stillness represents a state of mind where conflict and mental violence have ceased, because any form of stimulus has ceased. Nothing disturbs the silent observation of black stillness. It is a state of mind where there are no criticisms, no conflicts, no confusions, no punishments. Just silence, a silence enshrouded in the mild calmness that arises from hatred. I have often desired since to escape to this realm. The ‘black ocean of stillness’ is my name for this state. The traditional name is ‘the void ’.

In the cycle of reincarnation, heaven is a psychic world orientated around love. The black ocean of stillness orientates around hate. Therefore, this ocean is the true binary state of existence to heaven. [In my view, the binary state to hell is the meditational trance state of samadhi].

Interestingly, in some theosophical and mystical writings, reality is pictured as god being at the centre, surrounded by a dense black cloud that separates god from the rest of creation. In order to achieve union with god (portrayed as total love), the mystic has to journey through the barrier of this black cloud. But what the black cloud represented was a mystery to those writers (because those writers were not aware of the depth of their own hates). This black cloud, as a void, is only the black ocean of stillness. In my understanding, god centres on equanimity (in Nirvana) ; creation is then centred on love and hate, as the bases of unity and separation respectively. My views differ from tradition because I have experienced and accepted the subconscious mind, instead of denying it.

In religious theories of existence, states such as heaven, hell, purgatory are familiar features, though names change and some states may fall in and out of conceptual fashion (for example, in modern Western circles it is no longer the fashion to believe in the reality of heaven). But states like oblivion and the black ocean are not desired nor experienced. The reason is that religious teachers and thinkers are never pushed to the extremes of sorrow that I, and many others, have been pushed.

The confused world of the insane is not considered to have any relevance to such teachers and thinkers. The confused world of the insane is just an irritation to be brushed aside during one’s quest for the sublimity of high spiritual states. By excluding states of intense sorrow from their understanding of reality, such teachers and thinkers can produce a fairly standard and rosy conception of spirituality.

But when fate makes one go through the experience of having intense desires for these states of misery then this experience changes forever one’s concept of spirituality.

Spirituality is not just about experiencing the light, but also about experiencing the darkness.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. A summary of the factors of some important emotions is :
Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.
Anxiety = fear + vanity.

My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See Basic Ideas. [1]

[²]. I introduce the use of the term "unconscious idea" in the first article on Emotion. [2]

[³]. The issue of rejection gives rise to the experience of trauma in infancy. An article on Bonding focuses on some problems of a sensitive child and explains an unintentional source of infancy trauma. This is on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, or The Subconscious Mind, or Discover Your Mind.

In more detail, infancy trauma is explained in two articles. The first article, Vulnerability of the Ego, focuses on the origins of violence. And the second one, Guilt & Meaning - part 2, centres on why trauma occurs unintentionally. [3]

[4]. There is an article on Alienation on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. [4]

[4a]. More ideas on the violence that originates from anger are described in the article Violence and Loss of Freedom, sub-section Anger. [4a]

[5]. My analysis of the process of abreaction is given in the five articles on Abreaction. See home page. [5]

[6]. The idea of having two identities is introduced in the article, Confusion and Identity. A more detailed analysis is given in the article Two Identities, on my website The Subconscious Mind. [6]

[7]. Identification is described in the article Identification & Absorption, on my websites The Subconscious Mind and Discover Your Mind. [7]

[8]. There is an article on Sublimation on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. And an article on Internalisation is on my website Discover Your Mind. See Links page. [8]

[9]. A person who is asleep may be under genuine attack. In this case it is from a psychic entity, which has been called a night entity. This problem is described in the article Energy Transfer.
More conflict dreams are described in the article Violence and Loss of Freedom, sub-section Violence in Dreams.
Dreams which feature either paranoia or revenge are described in the article Destructiveness, sub-section Dreams of Conflict.
There is an article on Reverie and Dreams on my website The Subconscious Mind. [9]

[10]. To understand introjecting, see the article Projection and Introjection, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. [10]

[11]. The idea of social approval is described in the article Social Approval & Inferiority, on my website The Subconscious Mind ; or in the article Approval & Inferiority & Power, on my website Discover Your Mind. [11]

[12]. The problems with sensitivity are described in the article Sensitivity & Effects of Fear, on my website Discover Your Mind. [12]

The articles in this section are :

Guilt & Meaning - part 1, catatonia and faith

Guilt & Meaning - part 2, trauma and slow-onset catatonia

Narcissism & Schizophrenia

Narcissism - Mania & Manic Depression

 

Jealousy & Kundalini Psychosis

Pride & Paranoia

Depression & Autism & other states of despair

Mind Loops

Copyright © 2003 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the article is free to use. It can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.

Ian Heath
London, UK

www.confusion.discover-your-mind.co.uk/index.htm

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