Dan: What is depression?
Dr. Hollis: I think first of all we have to differentiate between depressions because it‘s
a blanket term which is used to describe many different experiences, different contexts
and different internalized experiences of people. First of all, there is the kind
of depression that is driven by biological sources and it is still a mystery as to how that
works. We know it affects a certain number of people in profound ways. Second, there
is reactive depression which is the experience of a person who has suffered loss and as
we invest energy in a relationship or a situation and for whatever reason, that other is
taken away from us, that energy that was attached to him will invert as
depression. Reactive depression is actually normal.
We would have to figure out where that fine line is and where it might cross over into
something that was more than normal. When we say that a person is grieving too long
or it is affecting their lives so profoundly, that’s a judgment call, of course, but we do
know people that have been sort of destroyed by reactive depression because they had
attached so much of their identity to the other, whatever it might be: a position in life
that they lost or a relationship that was important.
But I think none of us can avoid occasional reactive depressions because life is a series of
attachments and losses. Most commonly, when we think about depression, however, we
are really looking at a king of intra-psychic phenomenon where we might say there are
parts of ourselves that are contending with each other.
We are subject to a lot of interpersonal strife and conflict between values. For example,
there are conflicts of duty and we have an obligation to many competing values within
us. I mean, one of the most obvious duties that we all live with is that you have to earn
a living to support yourself and your family and on the other hand, the price of the
particular way in which you are doing it is psychologically and perhaps, physically, costly to
you. So already, there is a significant conflict there. If the ego continues to override
that conflict without addressing it, we could expect the symptoms, including
the symptoms associated with depression, to show up.
In effect, the good news and the bad news are the same here in the sense that the
psyche is not passive, it’s active, it’s continuously expressing its point of view and it is
manifesting in our body which is somatic issues in our emotional life, in our behaviors
and of course, in our dream life. Those expressions of opinion are often something we
call “symptoms” in the contemporary mindset and we want to sort of replace symptoms
as quickly as possible and that is understandable. At the same time, the real question
is why have they come, what is our own psyche trying to say to us. Or, put it another
way, for what reason is my psyche refusing to cooperate with the agenda that my conscious
life has addressed and emerged into?
The withdrawal of energy is often profoundly conflictual within and produces a lot of
suffering. The more I might push myself, the more depressed I might get. So from a
psycho-dynamic standpoint, you would say, well, what really is the value conflict here
and how is it that we can learn from the psyche and what we might consider a more
appropriate set of choices for you.
The Recovery of Personal Authority
Dan: I would like to read a brief passage from your wonderful book, “What Matters
Most: Living a More Considered Life”. In there you write:
“The recovery of personal authority is critical to conduct in a reconstruction of the
second half of life. If we are a little more than our adaptations, then we collude with
happenstance and remain prisoners of fate. No matter how sovereign we believe we
are, we remain the loneliest of surfs to the tyrannies of whatever remains unconscious”.
I think one of the things that I found interesting, as I read further on in the book, is
your notion of psychological adaptions and how they relate to somebody who is
suffering from depression. Can you elaborate on what role adaptations serve with
depression?
Dr. Hollis: Well the fact that we have survived as individuals and also a species in an
often very difficult environment is a function of our capacity of that adaptation.
Without the ability to adapt one would be destroyed by the conditions of life. But then,
you see, to some degree one’s becoming identified by whatever the environmental
factors were that necessitated that adaptation, what happens is through repetition or
the fact that these adaptations often occur very early in life, I mean adaptation such
as avoidance patterns or the way our engagement with others works out or our
compliance adaptations and so forth, these often tend to get replicated a lot and become
sort of behavioral systems within each of us.
So that we can fast forward several decades and find ourselves really the creatures of
these adaptive patterns: patterns that were once protective, but because they keep
getting applied to new situations become constrictive and oblige repetition.
Sigmund Freud noted early that the power of the repetition of compulsion and the
power of programming within each of us. The problem of the unconscious, of course, is
that we can’t say anything about it definitively and yet these behaviors and their
patterns keep falling into the world from us so therefore we would have to admit that
they are coming from us and therefore, we have some accountability for it.
And so, as a therapist, one of the things that we look to discern is what are the patterns
that are coming out of this person’s life, from where they might they come and then to
make these adaptations more conscious and to see how they get systematized, and
then at some very profound level, we could see a person who is operating in a very
powerful position outwardly can, in fact, be enslaved to the messages of decades ago.
What he believes is his free choice is often his protective mechanisms and again, they
are there for good reasons, but they completely ignore the fact that the individual has
grown up.
He now has a consciousness, he has an empowerment, he has a capacity for resilience
that were not present in the life of the child and therefore, there is a kind of
unconscious regression every time one of these implicit messages takes over
consciousness, so, until we can begin to recognize what are the silent messages to which
we are in service, we remain prisoners of history and the very adaptations that were
necessary during our childhoods are now constricting agencies. Working through that
and stepping into risk, stepping into an enlargement of vision and honoring the desires
within us that wish to be expressed through us into the world.
Sounds simple in the abstract, but in fact people often find is that their most difficult
obstacle are their old fear-based adaptations that once were necessary long ago, but
today are binding us to a disabling past.
We All Feel Shamed by Life
Dan: Here’s another quote I would like to read from your book, “What Matters Most:
Living a More Considered Life”:
“All of us feel shamed by life. All of us consider ourselves failures of some kind, screw ups
in something really important to us. Notice how shame, consciously or unconsciously
pulls us away from risk, ratifies our negative sense of worth through self-sabotage or
compels us into frenetic efforts of overcompensation or yearning for the validation
from others that never comes; how much each of us needs to remember one definition
of grace as accepting the fact that we are accepted despite the fact that we are
unacceptable”.
It is just a beautiful passage that I think captures so much. A lot of your writing
addresses the issues and problems that all of us must face at mid-life. Can you talk
about that some more? What connection does shame have to do with all of this, with
depression suffering and so forth?
Dr Hollis: I would like to respond to two things. Before we hit mid-life, we often
identify with those adaptations that carry us into our lives and create relationships,
professions and life patterns. Then by mid-life, we can typically no-longer ignore
the protest that may be coming from within us or in our marriages or in our other
behaviors. It is at that point one might begin to question what is going here really.
“Who am I, apart from my history? Who am I, apart from my roles?”
It can lead to a very interesting conversation which can, in turn, lead to some
significant changes and a greater freedom in the second half of life. But, I think most
people feel shame. Now, the difference between shame and guilt is that with guilt we
feel that we are accountable for something we did or failed to do and often that has a
powerful effect on people’s lives. But shame is a feeling that who I am in itself is not
sufficient or it is contaminated in some way.
So people can be shamed by the conditions of their birth or the conditions of their
family origin or by events that occurred in a person’s life wherein he or she feels that
they were insufficient or inadequate. The kind of generosity or forgiveness or
acceptance we would give to another is often very hard to give to ourselves and so
typically what we do is we double our work or try to anesthetize our suffering.
But I think shame is an often neglected feature in peoples’ lives and will show up in two
primary ways. One is through patterns of avoidance and hiding out from the life we want
to live. The other is grandiosity which is an over-compensation so that one has to
continuously try to prove one’s worth to others and that exertion, in the end, leads to
greater and greater sense of frustration and emptiness.
Since we are often not conscious of any of this, whatever accomplishments are there are
never enough. It can drive a person higher and higher and higher in his or her efforts to
demonstrate personal worth as a treatment plan for guilt. That person remains very
much hooked by that which invariably leads to excess and then leads to consequences
which again feeds the shame cycle again. I think one of the hardest things in life, in
addition to recovering personal authority, is learning self-forgiveness and self-
acceptance. These are not easy things because they must include honest
accountability for choices made, choices not made and for consequences that are choices
produced.
Striving for Success and Shame
Dan: Jim, would it be fair to say many successful people or those who strive for
success, in some way continually over-compensate in their lives and careers? And when
they, in some sense fail to meet these unconscious goals of success, however well or
fully defined, they feel shame?
Dr Hollis: That’s right. I think most folks have seen the film, Citizen Kane. That whole
story basically was a portrait based on the life of overcompensation; a power-driven
person who is still compensating for the conditions of poverty and shame of his
childhood. If one could have unlocked that secret early, his path in life might have
been less destructive and less driven by demons, so to speak.
Frankly, that’s the role of therapy. I believe therapy is such an important means by
which one can have a conversation with oneself. Too often, people associate therapy
with some grand pathology. But I think if we explore it rather as a kind of
encounter with one’s deepest self, that one will begin to realize that I myself am a
mystery, I am a complexity, I am a richness of which I know only a small portion from a
conscious standpoint. It is not about self-absorption or narcissism.
Quite the contrary, it is a humble dialog with a therapist. And then one becomes,
frankly, less dangerous to the world. We become a more available partner, spouse,
parent, and colleague and I think can begin to zero in on what really does matter to
us, what choices we are making.
Life is Not a Problem to be Solved
Dan: One of the things I took away from your book is the idea that most of us, on an
unconscious level, believe that life is a problem to be solved rather than mysteries to be
lived.
I think that this insight has helped alleviate a lot of my depression and others I know.
With depression, there’s so much ruminative thinking. We get caught in this vicious
circle of trying to solve depression. Or, in a greater context, larger issues such as, “Why
was I born into a family with an alcoholic father? Or, “Why am I such a screw-up?” We
try to answer these negative questions over and over again. But these are questions
with no true answers.
Dr Hollis: I think that we need to realize that suffering depressions – – and I put that
in the plural- – is actually a normal human experience and highly functioning people
and capable people often have what I would call “pockets of depression” and yet are not
governed by it.
These pockets of depression have to do with real losses they have experienced in their
lives or the experience of internal conflicts. The human condition itself involves
suffering and we always have to ask a question, “Is the way in which I am experiencing
my suffering and my conflict, is it leading me to a larger life or is it leading me to a
smaller life?” “Does it enlarge me or does it diminish me?”
And I think we usually know the answer to that question. The flight from suffering leads
to an inauthentic life, to a superficial life. So, I think it’s important to recognize that in
the course of our journey, we will, from time to time, visit what I call “The Swampland
of the Soul”. And in every swampland, there is a task and if we can identify that task
and address it, it can lead us out of victimhood and into a large consciousness.
One of them is depression. So again, we have to remember that the word means “to
press down”. So, we must ask ourselves, “What is being pressed down?” “What energy,
what value, what agenda, what desire is being pressed down and are we the unwitting
agencies of that oppression or is it something that has happened to us along the way
with which we identified and what life wishes to be served? And in many cases,
people, by just asking these questions, will be led to a larger life, a change, if not a
change of direction or course in life, a change in some of the attitudes with which they
address daily life.
James Hollis, Ph.D. was born in Springfield, Illinois. He graduated with an
A.B. from Manchester College in 1962 and with a Ph.D. from Drew
University in 1967. He taught the Humanities 26 years in various colleges
and universities before retraining as a Jungian analyst at the Jung Institute
of Zurich, Switzerland (1977-82). He is a licensed Jungian analyst in private
practice in Houston, Texas, where he served as Executive Director of the
Jung Educational Center of Houston from 1997-2008. He is a retired Senior
Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, was
the first Director of Training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute, and is vice
president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, which is dedicated to the
publication of the complete works of Jung. In addition to the book “Living a More Considered Life: What
Matters Most,” he is the author of the best-selling book, “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:
How to Finally, Really Grow Up”.
