[Phenomenology of depression (author's transl)]

The term "phenomenology" is often misused as a synonym for clinical description. In fact phenomenology has no interest for symptoms but for phenomena. Viewed phenomenologically, depression is not sadness because sadness is a feeling about somebody or something and depression is a mood, i.e. a global mode of being. Sadness, as a feeling, has a temporal course, whereas depression, as long as it is present, seems to have neither beginning nor end, and is helplessness in its core. Most of all, sadness pertains to the psyche: depression as a state of "living body" is bodily as well as psychic and, to put it shortly, "vital depression" is pleonastic. The paper ends by a phenomenological view of classification of depressive states which is rather classification of types of depressivities, i.e. of global modes of being.