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By whatever name, emotional illness as a vicissitude of human existence has been with us for as long as we know anything of humankind. As long as there has been death and miscarriages of mourning, unrequited love, failure of ambition and the fading of faculties, vulnerability to sorrow, despair, and depression, there has been emotional illness. We know of no Golden Age of immunity.
The traditional wellsprings of a culture's wisdom derive from myth, with its literary descendants, and the formal science of its period. History and biography, with their claims to factuality, perhaps link the two. Add to these our individual, private experiences, often inarticulate, and we have rich potential sources for knowledge of emotional states in general, and specifically of depression. The scientific approach attempts to conceptualize and treat depression in terms of the science of the times — be it early primitive magic, or rites as part of a religious conceptual system, or what we hold today to be scientific enlightenment.
The mythic approach to depression, often linked to religion, contains a core of psychological understanding. At times, there was a search for causality in terms of human or godly responsibility — often with an admixture of punitiveness and judgmentalism. Release was sought by some expression of woe, and solace by affirmative experience. The psychoanalytic orientation at times happily unites with these varied approaches as culture-medium for its own approach, but it has no monopoly on knowledge or wisdom — or error.
It is enriching to be in touch with the root experiences of the