New Lacanian Perspectives on Depression: From the Presence of Emptiness to the Emptiness of Presence and Development

This chapter traces the various normal and necessary losses, of object and ego that the subject needs to endure throughout the course of development, and relate them to the various manifestations of depression. S. Freud emphasised that there are different types of depression with varied aetiology. Depression is a heterogeneous group of conditions/ symptoms produced by different forms of causality. Although Lacan never dedicated a seminar to depression, Lacanian theory has many relevant concepts with which to frame and organise a fundamental psychoanalytic understanding of depression. The chapter offers a postmodern perspective on the use of a Lacanian or postmodern psychoanalytic framework in the treatment of homosexual neurotic structures. Within the Lacanian framework, emptiness of presence can be linked to the register of the Real in inseparable relationship to the registers of the Symbolic and Imaginary. The symbolic order and the ego ideal are impermanent and under perpetual construction and reconstruction/ permutation.