They’re both there, always. Guilt and resentment are not separate—they’re
two sides of the same feeling. One cannot exist without the other. You can’t
blame yourself without blaming someone else, or vice versa.
Mixed feelings are normal, especially when they have to do with sex
or aggression, both of which have very strong moral overlays. There’s often
an internal struggle between what you actually feel and what you think
you should feel. Sometimes people use repression to make the less accept-
able part go away, but there is no awayto go to.
Often, depressed people have strong compunctions about aggressive
impulses, so they push them out of their awareness. As we’ve seen with fear
disorders, just because people can’t see aggression in themselves doesn’t
mean it isn’t there.
Analysts theorized that depression was anger turned inward, and the
appropriate therapy involved turning it outward again by having depressed
people talk about who they were reallyangry at. Sometimes it works, but
sometimes it just taps into the endless spiral of blame and guilt that is
depressive rumination.
Rachel stares out Dr. Judy’s window at the world that seems to
be passing her by. “Even if someone did want to go out with me,
I couldn’t fall in love,” she says. “I have no way of knowing what
love is, because I’ve never had any.”Today, the idea that depression is anger turned inward is often cited
as evidence of how silly psychoanalytic theory is. But is it? If you’ve ever
had a midnight call from a depressed person, you know how mixed and
confused their feelings are, and how easily they can elicit the same mixed
and confused feelings from you. It’s enough to make you wish that depres-
sion was just a serotonin deficiency.
Regardless of your opinion about psychoanalytic theory, you’ll still
have to deal with explosions into contagious guilt that may or may not be
anger turned inward. Here are some ideas that may help:
DEAL ONLY WIT HMANIFEST CONTENT. By definition, latent emotions are
unconscious, which means thatpeople are not aware of them.Remember
that always.
It’s pretty clear that Rachel is a bit miffed that you won’t abandon
your needs and minister to hers. She’s not aware of her hostile feelings,
The Psychology of Depression ❧ 183