Everything you write resonates through my body. I need to sneak back later to finish reading this post, but it's dead on so far.

In my dreams, my parents' house is often the locus of my depression, a dark and confining but comfortable womb-like place from which I can't leave.

One of the 12 Steps in my recovery from alcoholism involves revisiting the past and making direct amends to those harmed. I intended to do this with my parents the last time I visited, but found myself regressed to a mopey, moony, awkward young adolescent.

meeeeeeoww!

oh, yes. you hit the nail right on the head.

interesting, I see the mother's posture -- stuffed-shirt, stiff-armed erectness, false + compulsive smile -- to be much more suggestive of depression, albeit depression wrapped in hostility, than her daugher's. While awkwardness can be caused by depression, I think over-associating them is a real mistake. Conversely, the I don't think the signifiers of confidence should be taken as signs of mental health.

Sam, I'm reading this differently than you, apparently. The daughter and mother pictured are metaphors for a way of experiencing one's relationship to the world. Take the semiotics of their posture at face value, understand them as objects, surface only, and not subjects with deep, complex levels in their psyches. In this way, the picture works with Nathalie's text wonderfully.

It's not necessarily that "confidence good, awkwardness bad," but that metaphorically, to be an adult in relationship to the world is to have a sense of self and boundaries, to meet it as an equal. Depression, in my experience, often reminds me of being an adolescent, because, again metaphorically, to be an adolescent in relationship to the world is to be half-formed, mutable, volatile, to have no voice or a voice only defined by opposition to the world, with no alternative "yes" to replace what is defied.

At least that's my experience with depression, and with adolescence, and that experience colors how I read the text.

Holy god. I am having an out of body experience. When I saw that picture last week I obssessed on it-- kept clicking back to it as I drank my coffee and read the nyt on-line. I ached for that girl. ((And you haven't even dug into the body stuff-- girl is clearly packing some late-night Krispy Kremes and mama who is right out of Mean Girls ("I'm still a teenager") with a defined arm muscle from workouts with her personal trainer.)) But then, I figured, she's grinning, maybe she isn't chemically configured for depression-- maybe she's one of those hardy pioneer types who won't ever see what we see or experience what we did. That's how I let go of the pic-- and now it's back and now I'm re-thinking it all. And warding off the pot of angst it stirs. Sorry for such a long post-- you just hit me between the eyes with this one.

i agree with the interpretation of this image on a metaphorical level, but something about this discussion nags at me...am not sure this girl would appreciate having her image kidnapped and used as a symbol of depression. if she were depressive, it would probably send her lower to read this. i don't at all disagree with you, i suppose it's just that the part of me that is like her shrinks from the thought of that kind of exposure.

The depressive self and the high-school self: in me, anyway, both are the sites of a radical, destructive, enervating self-absorption, a "bondage of self." Then, too, for lots of us, our high school selves are the scene of the crime, the era to which we date back that collection of feelings, attitudes, and responses which we've come to think of as our depression. I used to skulk around the mall saying shocking things and looking sideways to see who noticed. I felt quite hollowed-out back then, like a band-shell.

My God -- These comments are much smarter than my original post.

Jeffrey --

I'm not sure what it you are getting at. I think that I am looking at them as metaphors, taking them at surface level and analyzing their posture as a relationship to the world. I'm certainly unhampered by any knowledge of the "deep, complex levels of their psyches."

I don't see adulthood as being primarily about a sense of self. To me, the important part of adulthood is being able to "see around" oneself, to be able to see and reach other people, to escape the "bondage of the self" that pessoa refers to. This takes a certain kind of self-certainty, but I think it is very dangerous to consider all self-certainties as equal to this task.

Part of the lure of depression is the certainty it offers -- there is a security to knowing that the rock of unhappiness will always be there for you. That is why the idea of being horrified by a young person who looks happy, if "lumpy," is very troubling to me. She appears to be reaching out to the world, however uncertainly, whereas her mother seems utterly walled-off and sterile, clinging to that rock in a frozen rictus of contempt. If the mother doesn't provoke a difficult response in the viewer, it is only because she provokes no human response at all -- there is an absence of feeling there. This is a cold comfort indeed.

So we end up back with the daughter. Don't you see that to attack her is to attack her for her struggle? She is happy, she is not defeated by depression; her mother is, and resigned to that defeat. To switch desire over to the mother can only be an embrace of depression, and for someone struggling with mental illness, it is the exact wrong direction to go in. It domesticates depression, makes a pet of it; which is to say it tames some of its harsher edges at the price of bringing it closer to the heart of one's life. Don't do it -- however difficult, the primary identification with the daughter has to be defended.

Sam --

The principal disconnect in our "conversation" may be that I only glanced at the picture and then dealt with Adolescent and Adult as Archetypes (of a sort) without referring to the original pic. Oop, my bad.

That said, I'll take your interpretation of the women in the photo (which, on second look, makes sense) for the moment and type while I think ...

1) You seem to be saying that the signifiers of confidence (as defined by our culture, I assume) don't necessarily signify genuine confidence. OK. I can see the mother as hostile and cold rather than confident. Given this, she would be embodying the Adolescent archetype I posited earlier, as she defines herself "in opposition to" the world, believing this is her only chance to hold on to the semblance of self she has built up as a bulwark against the "adult world" in which she is expected to function.

2) Re: the daughter, who's "horrified"? Who's "attacking"? The way I read it, the comments of myself & others have sympathized with her adolescent awkwardness, and appropriated that aspect of her for our own exploration of an aspect of our own depressions. That particular aspect was separated from her happiness, in my reading, by Nathalie's qualifying clause "while Alexis, like I said, seems happy, her posture reminds me of the experience of depression ..."

3) I would argue that "to see around oneself" one must first have a genuine sense of self. When the boundaries are blurry, in my experience, both inside and outside are difficult to make sense of.

I don't know if that makes my position clearer, and I don't know if my position is terribly solid. Anyway, I'm glad to have read your expansion of your previous comment though. I agree with your caveat that "Part of the lure of depression is the certainty it offers."

Jeffrey --

1) + 3) I guess we have a very different sense of the word "confidence" -- personally it makes me shudder -- and how the dichotomy of self and world operates one that is unlikely to be resolved here. I've written a short piece on the subject if you're interested in my thoughts. Basically, I understand sense of self and world as co-evolved; I think trying to place self-knowledge prior is tenuous and unproductive.

2) "Horrified" and "attack" may be overstated...but barely. There were frank, rather cruel statements about the "ugliness" of a vulnerable girl and a snide implication about her weight. No amount of soft-soaping can obscure that. How am I supposed to be comforted by this kind of "sympathy?"

I'm glad you liked the article. I think words have a lot more power over us than we often think. Reading these words right now, I am speaking inside your head, in your own voice. It is a much more intense process than is usually acknowledged. The very process is a kind of ventriloquism, a precise "negation of the power of the individual." It is a manipulation on the face of it, is it really that heretical to suggest that we may be controlled by words we carelessly accept into our vocabularies?

When writing CT, I was using Bill Burroughs' greatest theoretical insight -- the idea of the word-virus ("a bit of word and image") as a jumping-off point. To follow the metaphor through, a virus fools your body into thinking it is part of you, while it covertly appropriates your productive powers. There is no better metaphor for the local action of capital.

Now let me throw you one more twist -- following Burroughs, I view this co-habitational, mutagenic capacity of language not only as a trap, but also as the greatest promise of society. The real question is what is produced, what is facilitated? Burroughs suggests that the greatest evolutionary leaps may have been caused by viruses. But other viruses are lethal.

So what power does the individual retain? The power of rejection, of saying "that is not me!" The question is how to do this without falling away from other people entirely, which is to say, falling into depression. It is an awkward process, and I think that it is important to trust that awkwardness; even, to become comfortable with it. That's why I defended the daughter.

"Pop culture tells us that teenage girls are hot and fun." Which they do in part by casting actors several years older than the characters they're playing, so we rarely see an on-screen adolescent who's really adolescent.