Rituals Against Depression

~ Clarissa

Byung-Chul Han makes it clear that rituals and depression are incompatible. Rituals, he says, relate us to the world. They distract us from our selves, and that unburdens us and makes life lighter. An excessive fixation on the self is a depression-causing trap. Rituals also protect us from the most painful, caustic effects of raw emotion.

In Paul Murray’s novel The Bee Sting, characters become obsessed with discovering and revealing to themselves the most authentic way of being. They turn into closed down systems that are constantly trying to figure out who they really are. In such an exercise, the self is ceaselessly trying to produce itself. That makes all of these characters miserable. They thought that circling down the deep drain of their inner life in hopes of reaching its ever elusive center is what freedom was about. In reality, this was worse than any jail.

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Published by Clarissa

9 thoughts on “Rituals Against Depression”

  1. Depression is not an excessive fixation on the self. That’s an obnoxious thing to say. At any rate, rituals support the health and feelings of belongingness of those suffering from depression; they help depressed individuals (like myself) continue living. You’re supposed to know this stuff.

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    2. Maybe it’s not clear from my post. I’m discussing a book by the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. These are his ideas. Han is one of the most important thinkers of our time. As a philosopher, he says countercultural, provocative and “obnoxious” things because that’s how he moves towards a more profound understanding of things.

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      1. And honestly, the need to point out every little un-PC thing that a philosopher of Han’s caliber of necessity says is sad, simply sad. We are getting to the point where all we’ll be able to say are pre-recorded slogans. How is our age going to produce any thinking at all if we are incapable of tolerating the tiniest departure from the reigning bromides?

        Han is my favorite living philosopher, and I’m upset on his behalf right now.

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  2. As your admired philosopher moves toward “a more profound understanding of things”, his admirers get one more excuse to kick people in the face, people like me. You know that people like me are walking around, right?

    People have threatened to kill me for “excessive fixation on the self”. No joke.

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  4. Somewhat related, from Sebastian Junger’s War:

    The study was duplicated in 1966 with a twelve-​man Special Forces team in an isolated camp near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam… There was a serious possibility that the base would be overrun, in which case it was generally accepted that it would be “every man for himself.” The two officers saw their cortisol levels climb steadily until the day of the expected attack and then diminish as it failed to materialize. Among the enlisted men, however, the stress levels were exactly the opposite: their cortisol levels dropped as the attack drew near, and then started to rise when it became clear that they weren’t going to get hit… “The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-​reliance, often to the point of omnipotence,” they wrote. “These subjects were action-​oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension.”

    Specifically, the men strung C-​wire and laid additional mines around the perimeter of the base. It was something they knew how to do and were good at, and the very act of doing it calmed their nerves. In a way that few civilians could understand, they were more at ease facing a known threat than languishing in the tropical heat facing an unknown one.

    Removing the focus from oneself and doing things out of habit or training are useful even if they don’t have an inherent purpose.

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