The Seba library treats Despair in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Horney, Karen, Hollis, James, Hillman, James).
The loss of self, says Kierkegaard, is ‘sickness unto death’; it is despair—despair at not being conscious of having a self, or despair at not being willing to be ourselves.
Horney, via Kierkegaard, identifies despair as the defining affect of self-alienation — a silent, clinically overlooked condition in which the individual has lost contact with the core of psychic existence.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
Notice how the circuitous logic of despair casts even expository statements as negatives… Who would not flee into the sweetmeat of despair, not feast on such carrion, the dead matter of soul’s defeat?
Hollis uses Hopkins’s verse to show how despair operates as a self-reinforcing logical structure that negates all affirmations, making it both seductive and corrosive to the soul’s vitality.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996thesis
It must have its death, if it would be reborn. If death is deprived in any way of its overwhelming reality the transformation is misbegotten and the rebirth will b[e false].
Hillman argues that the despair driving suicidal fantasy is the soul’s insistence on symbolic death as a precondition for genuine transformation — reducing it to a logical fallacy misreads its depth-psychological necessity.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis
The rage, hatred, and despair seem directed against the analyst, personally. Some interpreters have tried reducing the whole matter to transference enactions of childhood struggles.
Hillman positions despair in suicidal crisis as a force that constellates against the analyst through personal eros, arguing it exceeds mere transference and belongs to a deeper league between souls.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964supporting
It might be energetically adaptive to regress into a behaviorally inhibited despair phase in order to conserve bodily resources… a silent despair response might still optimize the likelihood that parents would eventually find their lost offspring alive.
Panksepp establishes a neurobiological substrate for despair, describing it as an evolutionarily conserved behavioral phase following separation protest, mediated by depletion of norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
His masculine beauty does not come out, and the rigid boundaries, the angry boy inside, the dead King, the robot-like interior soldiers, throw his family and his wife into despair. He is in despair himself.
Bly reads masculine despair as the psychic outcome of developmental wounding — the failure of paternal and maternal protection — expressed as perpetual aggression and compulsive violence.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
They say one thing to lead us into sin, another thing to overwhelm us in despair. And if we are sorrowful or inclined to despair, we are slower to sin again.
Climacus presents despair as a demonic stratagem deployed after sin to forestall repentance, distinguishing it from salutary sorrow and identifying it as a spiritual snare in its own right.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600supporting
Initial feelings of anger, guilt, rage, and despair resolve into a final acceptance of loss. Genuine grieving for our childhood ends our morbid fascination with the past.
In the context of adult children of dysfunctional families, despair is identified as a necessary stage of the mourning process whose metabolization is prerequisite to returning to present-centered adult life.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
I felt a wave of despair, because we seemed to have made some headway and then he went off to do some late skiing and came back and we were at square one again.
Greene records a clinician’s countertransferential despair when therapeutic progress collapses, illustrating how despair can arise in the analyst as well as the analysand.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987aside