ABSTRACT
Ehrenberg declares in La fatigue d’être soi (The fatigue of being oneself, 1998, p. 249) that depression and addiction are two figures of contemporary subjectivity, with addiction being a way to fight depression, according to psychiatrists. The author puts forward the hypothesis that depression is ‘a pathology of a society where the norm is no longer based on guilt and discipline, but on initiative. […] [T]he individual is therefore faced with a pathology of inadequacy. […] [T]he depressed person is a person who has broken down’, and ‘addiction is nostalgia for a lost subject’.
