XVII Dominik Lejman: SPRING WITH THE DEPRESSION
05.07. - 13.07.02

SPRING WITH THE DEPRESSION

INSUFFICIENT perspective
Depression derives from failure to perform - identity insecurity, feelings of insufficiency, responsibility fatigue, dissentification, failed recognition. In a society based on intiative, the enterpreneurial norms of performance became the norms of socialization. The subject is compelled to constantly redefine itself - choose his or her life as if any identity were possible. We are increasingly prone to depressive states that result from the individual's inability to meet the demand for speed, flexibility, responsibility, motivation and initiative. The imperative today is to initiate one's own identity instead of being disciplined to do so. Depression results from the inability to follow this perpetual quest for the re-invention of the self in a culture where "no moral law, no tradition shows from the outside, where the subject in conflict between the forbidden and permissable is gradually being replaced by a subject in cleavage between possible and not-possible. In a contemporary, enterpreneurial society, the self is always a treshold of being insufficiently istelf, leading to chronic problems of identity insecurity and the substantial increase of diagnosed cases of depression in the last thirty years.