8 Painfully, the melancholic experiences his/her rigidity in contrast to the movements of life going on in his/her environment. Kupke observes that some melancholic states involve suffering from a break between one’s own, subjective, time and an extraneous objective time, experienced as a falling behind, slowing down, or a total standstill of subjective

temporality, with a desynchronization between inner and external time-experience that causes psychopathological distress.10 Such desynchronizations selleck screening library become apparent because human activity tends toward the future — a future that includes interpersonal time; in the suspension of activity or radical passivity,

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical lived time is reversed because the future comes toward the inactive individual who simply waits for the future to become present, with a loss of normal futureorientation, of “being after something,” or of “appetitive tension.”8 Temporality is a field of shortage or a realm of void to be constantly fulfilled, which is ignored only insofar as one’s needs are not met, because one is never satisfied by the next moment as each moment in turn generates the potentiality Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of the next, yet-to-come. This need is always “now,” as the present is at least partially constituted by openness onto the future. This openness has direction and intentionality toward closure and fulfillment. One of Minkowski’s depressed patients reported the following: “I feel the desire to act, but this produces an opposite, reaction to that of

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical normal people; the phenomenon of stopping surges up and causes a complete discouragement… and I have the sensation of a negative void.”6 Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Patients with a severe depression may develop hypochondriacal delusions, Cotard’s syndrome (belief of being dead), or other nihilistic beliefs, and they may describe, a static structure of time in which there is no change, no beginning or end, with the horror of now, the eternal, ever-present, and never-changing.11 The very process of undertaking a psychiatric assessment that requires eliciting a history is made problematic. Nietzsche’s well known “thought experiment”12 points to the same disturbance of temporality that might underlie both severe also depression and psychotic mania: What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you: “This life which you live and have lived, must be lived again by you, and innumerable times more.” And there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh — everything unspeakably small and great event in your life — must come again to you, and in the same sequence and series…