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Who has turned us around like this, so that
always, no matter what we do, we're in the stance
of someone just departing? As he,
on the last hill that shows him all his valley
one last time, turns, stops, lingers —,
we live all our lives, forever taking leave.
Joan Didion's latest book, Blue Nights, is a disturbing and comforting guided tour through the travails of the depressive position. Depending on so many things, the depressive position is a mixed experience. Since we're all going to die, it is a place — for some, possibly only virtual — that resides in all of us all of the time. It is also the bomb shelter of our psyche, providing refuge for accepting the inevitable and mourning the intolerable of the human condition. It may very well be a place we want to visit, but we certainly do not want to live there year-round. At least not in Riviere's (1936) depressive position, which for her was apocalyptic desolation — not just a developmental watershed, but something to approach with real dread:
The content of the depressive position … is the situation in which all one's loved ones within are dead and destroyed, all goodness is dispersed, lost, in fragments, wasted and scattered to the winds; nothing is left within but utter desolation. Love brings sorrow, and sorrow brings guilt; … there is no escape, one is utterly alone, there is no one to share or help. Love must die because love is dead. Besides, there would be no one to feed one, and no one whom one could feed, and no food in the world. And more, there would still be magic power in the undying persecutors who can never be exterminated — the ghosts. (p. 313)