'The Phenomenology of Spirit' -- taken from the title of Hegel's 1807 masterpiece -- is the 'humanistic-existential energy' of the human soul, the human spirit. Or at least it is by my interpretation of what Hegel meant by it.
You can tell when you have it because you feel energized and 'full of life' -- you want to embrace people and embrace life; contradistinctively, you can tell when you don't have it because -- at its worst -- you feel a 'dark, depressive or death spirit emulating from your heart and your whole mind and body'. This is 'the abyss', 'the pit', or 'the garbage pail' of human existence. In between, we all have good and bad days but the mark of the completely depressive personality is that there are no good days -- they are all bad, or so we 'conceptually and emotionally construct' them.
Some depressions can be improved just by 're-framing' or 're-constructing' the way we think. There are other types of depressions that demand that we take radical action to change our whole life around -- and make it significantly better. In between are those of us who simply have good and bad days where a full night sleep will often do wonders relative to the preceding bad day.
Let's just say that I am having a very bad day where a decent night's sleep did not wipe away my preceding bad day. If I were on The Toronto Raptors basketball team, I would say that I am 'sliding on a two game losing streak'. Could be worse. Could be better.
Depression is often tied to addiction. Here is where you get the 'manic-depressive' or 'bipolarity' tag (the first tag is more descriptively concrete and includes the bipolarity issue). And here is what I would call 'The Depression-Addiction Cycle'. 1. You are working through the days problems and not coming up with the solutions you want. The problems are significant to your sense of existence. 2. You feel a loss of 'self-empowerment' or 'self-control'. The world is controlling you; you are not controlling it. 3. You plunge into 'the abyss of depression' which is basically 'uncontacted grief, anxiety, resentment, anger, rage, or the like. A Gestalt Hot Seat is in order. But you don't have a Gestalt Therapist in your back pocket. So you do the next best thing -- or so you think. 4. You 'contact your addiction' to try to make yourself feel better. That could be food, sweets, spending and buying, alcohol, gambling, drugs, sex....anything that 'kicks your pleasure principle into gear'...Worry about 'the reality principle later. 5. Depending partly on how bad your addiction is, and what your attitude is about it, you either: a) ignore help and keep on doing it; b) you wrestle though it yourself and get your Central Ego back in gear again so that it is working in a more 'Apollonian' as opposed to 'Dionysian' direction, and go back to trying to solve the same problems you couldn't solve the first time around. You either succeed -- or you don't -- or somewhere in between.
That is about the extent of my capabilities for this evening.
-- dgb
