It is difficult to criticize a book in which the author repeatedly reminds the reader of the harrowing mental anguish experienced while writing it critical reproaches are, one fears, the epitome of kicking someone while he's down. As an "atlas," it depicts a world view whose cardinal points are me, myself and I. In his memoir-cum-cultural-history The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, pharmaceutical scion Andrew Solomon, himself a depressive, provides for acute sufferers of Freud's diagnosis a measure of hope that such solipsism does not have to prevent recovery.Įven judged solely by the standards of the memoir, The Noonday Demon is remarkably self-indulgent. In fact, Freud proposed that depression stems from a kind of pathological egotism in which a fear of abandonment turns both love and hate inward toward the one person that will never leave: yourself. Far from it: Depression is a paradoxically self-centered affair - a black, sucking hole of inward attention that turns the entire world into a gray backdrop against which one's own pain stands out in agonizing hyperreality. But feelings of invisibility and isolation should not be confused with selflessness, or a lack of self-regard. People often think of depression as a loss of self.
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