The Cruelty Of Depression

By Jacques Hassoun

Book Overview

Melancholy, which came to be known as depression only in the twentieth century, continues to occupy a central place in psychoanalytic theory.The distinguished French psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201590468
• ISBN13: 9780201590463
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A Lacanian guide to sadness

Dr. Hassoun is smart, compassionate, and well-read. He can keep lots of ideas going simultaneously. In this substantial slim book he draws from literature (Proust, Tsvetaeva, Dostoyevsky, Christa Wolf, Kafka, Primo Levi, etc.), history, psychoanalytic studies, especially the works of Jacques Lacan. His own clinical practice informs his observations. He is a French medical doctor, and a Lacanian psychoanalyst - and in this book you must wrap your mind around Lacanian standards such as the Other - defined in a footnote on p. 25 as "that who internally represents all the wealth of signifiers (yet who can nevertheless be imagined as relay for the first Other, the mother)." His thoughts on substance abuse, addiction, eating disorders as they relate to mourning and melancholy are presented well. A main point is that depression and melancholy can't be "cured" with anything quick or pharmaceutical. Dr. Hassoun ranges far and wide in the service of his treatise; he quotes (among others) Thomas Mann, Andre Breton, Cocteau, St. John of the Cross, and his interesting patients - fluidly and appropriately. Not for the lazy reader. The Lacanian linguistic acrobatics are hard for the uninitiated. This good book requires readerly effort, and is worth it.