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It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to tell you that depression is in the air. Read any newspaper or magazine and you’ll see a proliferation of articles about contemporary mental health crises, often among teens complaining of anxiety and depression; or about various celebrities’ struggles with depression, experiences proclaimed and disseminated for the sake of so-called normalization; or about the global and national upsurge in the use of antidepressants, depression’s corollary. Like anxiety, depression is something we all seem to ‘have’, or have had at one time or another; the current cultural context (pandemic, war, economic upheaval, climate crisis) is undoubtedly a factor. In their editors’ introduction to Lacan on Depression and Melancholia, Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule are appropriately skeptical of the cultural deployment of depression as a concept, one that is ‘used by so many people, in so many different ways, that it has become virtually impossible to dislodge, to effectively question or critique’ (p. 1). In Lacanian terms, ‘depression’ has become a ‘master signifier’, a cultural quilting point that obviates its own exegesis, and that thus ‘falls short of clinical or conceptual rigor’ even within its very promotion and establishment of the so-called mental health fields. The spread of ‘depression’ as a marketing tool and handy diagnosis is, in fact, itself a depressive phenomenon, a symptom of a broader discontent ‘within contemporary Western culture’ (p. 4) and a kind of melancholic refusal of lack that itself performs as much as it designates the matter at hand. Perhaps indeed ‘depression’ as a signifier – or at least its repeated appearance in media and medical circulation – is a better means of diagnosing a culture than a person.
And yet, certainly, the book – after offering this framing gesture, by which a Lacanian perspective allows the editors to attend to the status of depression as a cultural signifier rather than as a signified – by no means goes on