Spleen: depression as a disorder of mood

‘Hope/Defeated, weeps, and the atrocious, despotic Anguish,/On my tilted skull, plants its black flag’ concludes ‘Spleen IV’ [#78]. The first way of looking at depression is as a condition characterised by a kind of mood. Moods are often ineffable phenomena hardly amenable to analysis or rational explanation. They are like an atmosphere which suffuses overall experience with an affective tinge. They colour pervasively the way we experience the world, other people and ourselves.^{Reference Rosfort and Stanghellini31} The ‘humour’ (state of feelings or mood) characterising certain forms of depression, is called by Baudelaire ‘spleen’ – it refers to the slowing or stopping of the flow of blood and other bodily fluids and suggests associations with hypochondriacal malaise, restriction, heaviness, bitterness, rottenness. The ancient theory of temperaments postulates the spleen as the organ in which circulation slows down and blood becomes thick, cold and dry, generating the melancholia (melaina chole). ‘Spleen IV’ (#78) abounds with feelings of constriction, congestion and stagnation: a ‘low, heavy sky weighs like a lid’ on the groaning spirit, and the earth is changed into a ‘humid dungeon’ in which, like a bat, hope goes ‘beating the wall's with her timid wings ‘knocking her head’ against the ‘rotten ceiling’. Meanwhile, rain stretches out its endless drip like ‘bars of a vast prison’.

This poem ends with another iconic image of depression, which has been extensively documented^{Reference Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl18} and portrayed by Dürer in his 1514 print Melencolia I: the ‘bowed head’, i.e. the chin resting heavily and inert on the hand. Its iconic recurrence was captured by Baudelaire's German translator Benjamin when he wrote ‘the downward gaze is characteristic of the saturnine, who bore through the ground with their eyes’.^{Reference Benjamin32}

Snuffling clock: depression as a disorder of lived temporality

‘The great bell whines, the smoking log/accompanies in falsetto the snuffling clock’ is an image in ‘Spleen I’ [#75]. For Benjamin, Baudelaire's spleen is neither sadness (the feeling of sinking into sorrow after the loss of the beloved) nor melancholy (a sublime spiritual state associated with loss). It is the degradation of experience arising from massive urbanisation and commodification of relationships. Here we find a second image of depression, linked to temporality rather than to mood: desynchronisation. In depression time is sick: its icon can be found in the ‘snuffling clock’ – la pendule enrhumée. The image of la pendule enrhumée links time (the clock) to stagnating humours (the French noun rhume means cold/catarrh: ‘a build-up of mucus in an airway or cavity of the body’³³). It encapsulates the freezing of time, a respiratory illness and the stagnation of mucus.

In ‘Spleen II’ [#76], depression is described as a lagging behind caused by a kind of lameness: ‘Nothing equals the slowness of those lame days’. Desynchronisation, according to Benjamin, is more than mere sluggishness: it is technological asynchronism. For example, in ‘The Swan’:

Benjamin's understanding of depressive desynchronisation links depression to modernity, urbanisation, the advent of artificial lighting – and finally the discord between the time of Man and that of the Cosmos, a theory also developed by phenomenological psychopathologists Tellenbach^{Reference Tellenbach34} and Fuchs.^{Reference Fuchs35} In natural environments, when ‘evening twilight’ challenges vision with fading light, our senses sharpen in compensation, generating perceptual alertness and a dreamlike vision and impression of transcendent reality. However, in cities artificial illumination and its amplifying stimulation overtakes the day's slow retreat and blunts the senses. Hence, especially the atmospheric senses such as taste and smell, weaken and ‘adorable Spring has lost its scent’. Crucially all this occurs when people have come primarily to ‘know one another as creditors and debtors, as sellers and customers, as employers and employees – above all they know one another as competitors’. The resulting experience is a sense of ‘permanent catastrophe’.^{Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings36}

Jean Starobinski^{Reference Starobinsky37} also discerns in Baudelaire specific aspects of the depressed person's experience at the dawn of modernity. Baudelaire was one of the first to write that being depressed means losing the feeling of correspondence between one's own inner time and the movement of external things. The depressed feels that the world is a dramatically accelerating external spectacle and, at the same time, his response is delayed by some a sort of immobilising impediment. Starobinski wonders whether the dizzying destructions and reconstructions of urbanisation of the modern era cause feelings of spleen and exile or whether Baudelaire's images are simply evoked because of the troubled mood of the melancholic who is not at peace until he can project his feelings onto an object. Which is the ‘basic’ phenomenon in depression? Is it primarily a disorder of temporality, a condition based on the desynchronisation between the personal and the city's time or is it first and foremost a disorder of mood, rooted in changing feelings in the most sensuous meaning of the word. The same dilemma in understanding depression may be found in phenomenological psychopathology. Straus^{Reference Straus, Baeyer and Griffin38} and Minkowski^{Reference Minkowski39} advocate the first explanation, Binswanger^{Reference Binswanger40} the second. In our view, the images are equally valid and interrelated.

Sinister mirror: depression as a disorder of self-consciousness.

‘Am I not a false chord/In the divine symphony,/Thanks to the voracious Irony/That scares me and bites me?’. The image of depression as someone contemplating himself in a mirror, the self-reflexive alienation of a person devoured by self-irony, can be found in ‘Eautontimorumenos’ (‘The Self-Tormenter’ [#83]. Depression is a severe kind of depersonalisation rooted in the nature of human self-consciousness which is capable of splitting between observing and observed Ego. When the split is complete, the first feels inane while contemplating the second in its despairing immutability. In ‘Beyond Redemption’ [#84] Baudelaire represents depression as a tête-à-tête, somber and limpid at the same time, of a heart that has become the mirror of itself, a well of truth, clear and black, where a pale star flickers – the ‘consciousness of Evil’:

For Baudelaire, because of a split of consciousness (but not due to masochism), the depressed is the ‘vampire’ of his own heart, ‘the wound and the dagger, the blow and the cheek, the members and the wheel, victim and executioner’. ‘Voracious irony’ which ‘shakes’ and ‘bites’ him, worsens depersonalisation and desynchronisation from the ‘heavenly symphony’, commanding eternal solitary sarcastic laughter and incapacity to smile sympathetically.

This understanding of depression can be found in Kraus and other clinical phenomenologists.^{Reference Kraus41,Reference Stanghellini42} What torments the severely depressed is their overwhelming sense of isolation rooted in the ‘feeling of the loss of feeling’,^{Reference Schulte43} an alarming sense of profound indifference or emotional detachment. They lament their emotional anaesthesia, especially inability to establish relationships with and love others.^{Reference Kraus41} Their loneliness is complemented by self-accusations and a sense of guilt. They speak of their past as characterised by inauthenticity. They compulsively criticise their previous solicitude and ‘over-involvement’ with others (i.e. the kind feelings they used to have when not in acute depressive states), which they now see as fake. They chastise their own inability to love others sincerely. Their whole experience is permeated by judgements on what is right or wrong, authentic or inauthentic, sincere or dishonest.