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From early on in his thinking, Sigmund Freud was attentive to the issue of helplessness in psychic functioning. Whereas Freud linked helplessness primarily to the affect of anxiety, later theoreticians like Edward Bibring conceptualized it as linked to depressive affects. The idea that helplessness is connected to depression is now well established in both psychiatry and psychology. Within a contemporary clinical psychoanalytic perspective, too, helplessness continues to be an important topic.
The framework in psychiatry and psychology within which helplessness is most often studied is the learned helplessness paradigm. Based on laboratory experiments with animals in the 1960s and 1970s, Seligman (1972) observed that animals experiencing inescapable events such as electric shocks, which no actions can control, develop dramatic symptoms of helplessness (e.g., passivity and despair). This phenomenon of “learned helplessness” has since then served as a paradigmatic model for studying human depression. Psychologists have elaborated the original learned helplessness model, which explicitly referred to psychoanalytic thinking, in a cognitive direction. The focus shifted toward the explanatory or attributional style a person uses in dealing with negative life events. A depressogenic cognitive style, in which negative events are interpreted internally in stable global terms, was considered an essential mediating variable for the development of depression. Recently, critical voices have pointed out the limitations of this dominant paradigm.
We studied helplessness using a different approach, that of narrative inquiry. We start, then, from a most interesting branch of research in current psychology, one unknown to many psychiatrists and clinical psychologists.
Narrative inquiry addresses the particular ways in which people use language and narratives in creating and elaborating their mental realities. A basic assumption is that people construct representations of the world by us