In this essay we explore the way in which both the meaningfulness of language and the meaningfulness of experience depend on our ability to maintain a certain independence of signifier from signified. Drawing on the theoretical work of Freud and Kristeva, and analyzing selections from literary works of William Styron and T. S. Eliot, we show how the relative opening versus closing of the gap between signifier and signified is correlated with more manic versus more depressive states. A therapeutic implication of this argument is that interpretation, which must recognize a multiplicity of meanings, works as a counterdepressive.