The Value and Meaning of Depression by M. Esther Harding
It is some years now, since I began collecting material about the Wilderness, which is perhaps the most apt symbol for depression.
It symbolizes a psychological condition or experience when one has the feeling of being in a desert place or in a wilderness—a feeling of being lost, lost in an inhospitable region, so lost that one is in a state of despair.
For the wilderness or desert is of course a place where there is no water.
Life is precarious, human life almost impossible.
A human being in the wilderness is alone, isolated, his life in great danger.
The springs of water, of life-giving water, have failed and no rain falls from heaven.
Heaven and Earth seem to have forgotten their children.
The name “wilderness” means wild-land, the uncultivated, usually unproductive surround to the relatively small area tamed by the group.
In the Old Testament, much of the narrative relates to small groups living in oases, supported by wells.
The wilderness surrounded these small groups who gradually made the beginnings of an establishment where the rules, written and unwritten, concerned the welfare of the in-group, all the rest of mankind being considered barbarians, the inhabitants of the wilderness.
Whenever the wilderness appears in myth or in dream it refers to a place or state of stagnation, where there is no life, where everything is arid and nothing can grow.
Indeed the wilderness only comes to life in the brief period of the spring rain.
Then as the Bible says: “the desert shall blossom as the rose,” as anyone who has been to the Arizona desert in the spring has seen and marveled.
All the rest of the year the desert is barren, stony, subject to extremes of heat and cold, the only living things usually being thorns and thistles—again I quote from the Bible story, while poisonous serpents, stinging insects and other noxious things usually abound.
Now when the wilderness appears in myth or dream it obviously refers to a psychological condition having these same characteristics—a condition where the flame of life sinks.
All energy disappears into the unconscious and the individual suffers from depression and inertia.
Life seems to be slowed down.
We have probably, each of us, experienced such a depression at some time in our lives.
This state may be short-lived, merely a passing mood, or it can be prolonged so that we can no longer look upon it as a passing mood, but must consider it as a sickness—of the soul—of the psyche.
In its worst form such a depression can amount to a psychosis, a melancholia or the depressive phase of the so-called manic-depressive insanity.
Such a depression, whatever its degree, depends on a withdrawal of libido into the unconscious, an “abaisement du niveau mental.”
Most people have at some period of their lives suffered from a state of depression of such severity that it could aptly be described as being in the wilderness.
A spirit of dullness and gloom and hopelessness falls upon one at such a time, and nothing seems worthwhile.
Life has temporarily lost its savor.
This condition may be nothing more than a mood, such as Kipling describes.
He compares it to a camel’s hump, a burden on the back that one cannot get rid of.
In typical extraverted fashion he advises exercise and the outdoors as a means to dispel the sultry inertia it induces.
“…The cure for this ill/ Is not to sit still/ And froust with a book by the fire/ But to take a large hoe and a shovel or so/ And dig till you gently perspire.”
What Kipling is advising, however, is not just physical exercise and a willed attempt to rouse oneself to throw off the burden.
Important as this change of attitude is, something more is needed.
And Kipling’s advice is far more than that, for he suggests that the sufferer should no longer merely toy with a book or even immerse himself in mental distraction, but should instead go back to Mother Nature to evoke the primitive, the original man in himself by digging in the earth.
Laurens van der Post tells us that to the Bushman of the Kalahari desert in Africa water has the meaning of spirit, while rain is personified as the Bull of Heaven.
There is a legend that when the rain came to earth in the form of the Bull he found a woman, the First Woman, and fell ardently in love with her, as Zeus, in the form of a Bull fell in love with Europa.
She returned his affection and, also like Europa, she mounted him, and guided him to a tree in a ravine where he fell asleep.
On waking he thinks the woman is still with him and so he returns to his own element plunging into a spring which rises in the center of a pool in the ravine.
Van der Post interprets this as meaning that the male water or spirit is contained in the female, earth, like a fountain of water springing out of the earth.
Van der Post first learned this story when he was in the desert with a band of Bushmen.
It was a time of terrible drought before the rains came.
At that time he thought of the earth as a woman talking to the rain as if it were a lover.
When he came to the camp a woman sitting beside the camp fire began to sing:
“Under the sun the earth is dry, by the fire alone I cry.
All day long the earth cries for the rain to come and take me away.”
Then a man replied:
“O listen to the wind you woman there.
The time is coming.
The rain is near.
Listen to your heart.
Your hunter is here.”
Van der Post continues: “This linking of the dry¬ ness of the earth with the state of loneliness in the woman’s heart: the coming of the rain to the earth with the hunter, seemed to me now anticipated and explained in these Bushman myths of the wind and the rain.” (Ibid. p. 234.)
This legend is similar to the Mayan ritual of the Rain-God. In Yucatan there are no surface springs and no rivers or brooks, for water sinks down through cracks in the limestone of which the land is made.
So all life, animal and vegetable is dependent on the supreme God of the Rain. And should the rains fail the Mayans performed a magic ceremony to lure the Rain-God back to earth.
A young maiden was chosen to be the bride of the God and was sacrificed to him by throwing her into the sacred cenote, a huge dinglelilce hollow.
This is a natural hollow, very deep with steep sides, and in its center is a pool of water, which was believed to be the home of the rain god. If he accepted the maiden as his bride there would be rain, but if he rejected her, and she came to the sur¬ face again, the rains would fail and the unfortunate girl was killed as having been rejected by God.
So to the Bushman the rainless wilderness speaks of the spiritual dryness and depression which the coming of the rain, the spirit, would dispel.
For the rain is indeed the creative moisture of the Spirit. And not infrequently in every¬ day life if when one is in a depression one can get back to nature, life does begin to flow again.
This is true, whether one digs in the earth of the outdoors, or whether one digs into oneself to find the instinctive primitive person in the unconscious.
It is as if the waters of the spirit that
had been dammed up in one’s depression begin once more to moisten our aridity.
As the alchemist Philalethias advises, “Moisten the dry earth with its own moisture.”
Whatever the cause of one’s depression may be, contact with the earth—either the inner ground of one’s being or the outer earth of our marvelous world—such a contact often has a healing effect.
In serious cases of depression travel and change of scene are often prescribed, for instance, in the hope that the lost libido, the lost interest, may be intrigued by distractions and that in this way the individual may begin to take an interest in life once more.
But these distractions are rarely of lasting help, the sufferer soon falls back into his depression again.
Now the cause of depression may be some set¬ back in life—a trivial and transitory one—per¬ haps, disappointment because something one had anticipated has failed to materialize, or a cherished plan has fallen through, or an ego wish has been frustrated.
When the depression is more serious, it may be due to a block in one’s whole life—the death of a loved one, the break-up of a marriage, serious illness, failure in business, or the collapse of all one’s hopes and ambitions.
These and such-like misfortunes are the experiences that may cause depression.
But whatever the cause, the determining cause, as we call it, may be, the mechanism of depression is loss of libido.
The life energy and interest disappear into the unconscious, and the conscious life is left high and dry, sterile, arid, miserable and isolated.
One feels oneself to be in a barren place, a wilderness or desert, where nothing grows and no life can flourish. ~
M. Esther Harding, The Value and Meaning of Depression, Page 1-5
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
