This process has reached a point after which the claim to social synchronization

and integration no longer can be substantiated. The consequence

of this is a fundamental shift in the forms of social control and individual
self-relation: these become ‘situative’, that is to say, they are determined
each time anew on the basis of the context concerned. One lives ‘in the
moment’, in a present that tends to shrink because it is less and less destined
by the past and tailored to the future, since the past has lost its binding
power and the future is experienced as utterly unpredictable

‘somatization’ is the rule rather than the exception.36

‘Depression’ – or however the dysphoria is culturally termed – as a social
phenomenon, a ‘social affect’, understood in terms of a basic ‘attunement’, is a
key thought in two texts on depression of the already mentioned Jacques
Schotte, which he wrote around the same time as Culture and Depression was
conceived and which I paraphrased in ‘Depression: resisting ultra-liberalism?’
(Bergh 2013). That was 30 years ago. It seems that only recently this kind of
phenomenological interpretation has started gaining momentum in the work
of people like Thomas Fuchs and Matthew Ratcliffe.

Further, by Schotte as ‘primary passion’: ‘primary passion of the soul, through which
this soul starts to appear in the world, to the others, and via these to itself ’
(Schotte 1982: 667). It is the sphere in which a pré-moi participatif, a participative
presubject, is involved in a process of continuous reciprocal attunement with
an ambiance, which Schotte relates to the ancient Greek word periechon,
meaning something like the encompassing bearing, so not something that is
surrounding an already constituted subject but something which constitutes
the presubject into a subject while this presubject is already resonating to that
ambiance (ibid.: 648). It is a sphere of primordial participation, an affective
being-in-the-world before any subject/object opposition: ‘a sort of reciprocal
interiority of “self ” and a world constituted by others as well, who together
with this “self ” (re)find themselves already on their way in the coming-andgoing
and the general anonymity of a primary participation’ (ibid.: 668). This
primordial attunement can turn into a distunement or detunement when the
‘feeling presubject’ has problems with ‘participating productively-receptively in
the global ambient coming-and-going of nature and life’ (ibid.: 643, 638). So
the ‘mood disorder’ depression is basically a participation disorder, as also Fuchs
acknowledges: ‘the patients lose the participation in the shared space of
affective attunement’, or, in the words of Ratcliffe, it involves a loss or corrosion
of ‘a changeable sense of belonging to the world that is pre- subjective and
pre-objective’ (Fuchs 2013: 228; Ratcliffe 2015: 56). Ratcliffe terms this
disruption of the sense of belonging as ‘existential change’, thereby redefining
depression into an existential phenomenon: ‘the label “depression” could be
restricted to cases that involve existential changes’. The so-called depression
epidemic would then involve different variants of ‘existential depression’
(Ratcliffe 2015: 253).