coffee & ink

Feminist analysis of depression, applying the insights of Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice and Mary Belenky et. al.'s Women's Ways of Knowing to revise the standard therapeutic assessment of depressed women as dependent and overly attached. The criticism of the model of the independent self is sound and the focus on women's relational ideas of the self and how breakdowns in those relations are expressed by depression are intriguing, but the book is fundamentally flawed in three major respects.

First, and most basic, Jack's sample is small and nonrepresenstative and she extrapolates from it in unacceptable ways. Although she has women both poor and middle-class women in her study, she does not address class in any way in her analysis. Every one of her subjects is white, which she does not address, and every one is straight, which she does address,poorly. Jack makes a woman's relationship to a single monogamous "partner" the core of her thesis of depression: she frames her entire analysis of depression in terms of a woman's relationship with her boyfriend/husband, sometimes with the inclusion of an analysis of behavior learned from parents. She does not examine other relational bonds at all; there is a brief mention of supportive female friendships in the final chapter, but nowhere does she examine the impact of depression's isolation and sense of self on friendships, sibling relationships, parental or filial relationships, working relationships, or functioning outside the home. She brushes past her few examples of women with relatively supportive spouses who still suffer depression, and she does not discuss lesbians or single women at all.

It's been a while, but I recall Belenky et. al. being criticized for similar limitations among their samples--that is, their subjects were all white, from a particular geographic location, and confined to a particular class (working to lower middle class). They appear to have written a book of essays in response to these criticisms, but I haven't found a copy yet. However, they were doing an intensive long-term study of a particular population, and I recall them as being much more cautious and limited in their interpretations and conclusions, which paradoxically made their interpretations much more convincing. Jack, by contrast, didn't form relationships with her sources or do a long-term study: she synthesized existing knowledge (good) and did several extensive interviews (not so good). The problem with relying on interviews for material is that Jack is terrible at listening to her sources, even though listening to women's silenced voices is her key metaphor: See the passage on pp.30-32, where Jack offers extensive quotes from three women which she says use the metaphor of the silenced voice themselves. Except they don't mention voice or silence at all.

Second, Jack fails to acknowledge any organic component to any depression. Even if you lean towards depresson as a learned response, it's pretty clear that behavior affects thought and thought affects behavior; we have some pretty good evidence that patterns of thought are literally patterns made in the brain, through familiar and easier chemical synaptic paths. Whether or not depression starts in the brain or the behavior, it clearly alters the brain, and any thorough analysis of depression should acknowledge that, whether or not the writer believes most depression to be biological in origin.

This failure, I believe, contributes to some of the problematic or flawed reasoning in Jack's analyses of depression. She describes common traits among depressed women such as the tendency to condemn oneself for behavior and emotion in strict and moral terms and the common feelings of distance and inability to communicate in intimate relationships, but classifies these attitudes as the causes of depression, rather than as a more complex combination of cause-and-symptom. For example, the feeling of distance, the need to rely on oneself and the feeling of excessive vulnerability and overreliance on others, appear even in relationships which Jack admits appear to be healthy, with partners who are supportive and sympathetic, but Jack continues to speak of depression as a unambiguous response to the partner's socially-conditioned failure to listen to the depressed woman.

This culminates in an awful chapter called "The Movement out of Depression," which isn't based on anything said or experienced by the women interviewed: it's woo-woo theoretical stuff that's based on Jack's hopeful reinterpretations of fairy tales with depression as a natural stage in a woman's life rather than a biological or psychological breakdown of thought and behavior. However much Jack wants to see depression as the equivalent of a forest journey, the women she interviews do not speak of it as a worthwhile experience which taught them valuable lessons: they speak of it as crippling, painful, and difficult, even when past.

Third, and strangely for a feminist writer and one who is sometimes directly examining physically abusive relationships, when Jack speaks of the threats to the self caused by the failure of relational bonds, she speaks of withdrawal and emotional loss. The biggest threat she mentions is the end of the relationship. She doesn't discuss any of the material physical or financial consequences that relational failure can have for women: physical abuse, death, lowered economic status for women and their children. Jack discusses how society and family history influence how women relate to others, how they suppress their desires and develop their resentment, how their means of behavior are socially mandated and enforced -- but she doesn't discuss the social impact of the expression of women's desires, beyond the ostracism suffered by one woman who had an affair and divorced her husband in a small, rural, conservative, Christian county.

Although Jack's critique is based on the feminist analysis of social pressures on women, the only pressures she examines are those that are focused on the family and romantic relationships. She briefly alludes to professional expectations of women, but does not examine them in any great depth, and does not explore the interactions of women's depression with their jobs, careers, or professional aspirations.

What's worthwhile here: The reframing of women's depression as a breakdown in the formation of healthy relational bonds, rather than as an overreliance on others in someone supposed to be independent; the examination of moral language in women's depression. But you have to comb through an awful lot of muck to get to it.