Narrative or self-feeling? A historical note on the biological foundation of the “depressive situation”

In her paper “The depressive situation” Jacobs (2013) stresses the role of normative evaluative and narrative processes in what creates the lived experience of depression. These “evaluative dynamics” are seen to emerge out of an “interplay of pre-reflective and reflective processes,” which are claimed as being “significantly altered in depression.” Even if acknowledging a pre-reflective level of the processes of evaluative selfand world-disclosure, Jacobs argues that this “cannot be reduced to or equated with a mere affective (or: “felt”) dimension.” Jacobs’ philosophical analysis ties in a way on the cognitive interpretation of depression that has prevailed since the 60s especially due to the work of Aron Beck and the development of cognitive psychotherapy for depression (Beck, 1975, 1979; Clark et al., 1999). However, Jacobs well admits that affectivity provides a mode of an evaluative process. Interestingly and in contrast to Jacob’s theory -, this affective, felt, dimension had once been considered as absolutely crucial for the “depressive situation.” But this was long before the cognitive turn in psychology overwhelmed psychiatry. So, my comment just wants to remind of the role of affectivity, or more precisely what was called “self-feeling,” in the very early theories of depression and mental disorder that were formulated at the beginnings of psychiatry as a medical discipline.