[Time and the depressive subject]

Dealing with the diseased man means dealing with man, and whether his disease be organic or psychic, this disease is, first and foremost, a human affliction imposed by life. Any attempt at understanding this affliction should first answer the question of what "being a man" signifies. When Nietzsche writes that man is an animal "not yet established", "an afflicted animal", one may understand that man is afflicted by himself and that he is not a man in the way a thing is a thing. Our approach is based on a phenomenology of existence which focuses on the style of existence of the concrete individual rather than on the supra-individual features of psychopathological syndromes. Actually, depressive conditions exist in all cultures and at all ages; this reality is as intimate to man as is his relation with time. In the common experience of our "good" and "bad" days, we are often unaware of time that passes or, on the contrary, we feel that time is sluggish and we discover two things. First, as shown by E. Straus, we experience two forms of time: a time of the Ego moving along with our own history and a time of the world which is a time we share with other men and with things. Depression has its roots in the discrepancy between these two forms of time. Besides, this experience shows that everything we do during our daily life can be withdrawn. We experience a loss, not of an object that disappears but of our feeling, of our contact with the ambient world.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)