Introduction to part 1

Anders Petersen's various single and co-authored papers on depression and anxiety, and their purported antithesis, 'happiness', provide an excellent counterpoint to the narrow and reductionistic individualistic and bio-psychiatric accounts of these conditions that tend to dominate in most contexts. A red thread running through all of Anders Petersen's work is the idea that depression and anxiety cannot be understood without understanding macro-level social, economic and cultural transformations associated with modernity, capitalism and neoliberalism that have reconfigured our understanding of the self, created distorted subjectivities and impoverished social relations. Meanwhile, the unhappy conditions of life in late modernity and neoliberalism that give rise to new epidemics of depression and anxiety are accompanied by a pervasive ideological injunction to 'be happy!'. Influenced by many sources in classical and contemporary social and political thought, especially critical theory, Anders Petersen shows us that, since the publication of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual - DSM-III in the early 1980s, depression and anxiety have increasingly come to be understood as undesirable individual psychiatric diseases that must be medicated away, rather than as conditions that could be the basis for self-reflection and social critique. In 'Authentic Self- Realization and Depression', Anders Petersen looks at how 'the new spirit of capitalism' (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) constructs the individual as an active, self- realizing, projective self whose value is limited to what they can actively contribute to the economic order so that we are under constant pressure to 'self-actualize', to fully 'realize our potential' and to become the most active, most 'successful' versions of ourselves. And not alone are we pressurized to become flexible, polyvalent, multi-tasking entrepreneurs of ourselves, we are interpellated and admonished to be happy in our servitude and to 'clap along' to neoliberalism's relentless, wearying, never-ending apocalyptic carnival of competitive individualism. While several contemporary authors influenced by Foucault (1991) have advanced critiques of how we become subjects under modern and more recently late-modern neoliberal orders, Anders Petersen gives us an original, stronger and clearer perspective by bringing the Foucauldian general thesis of 'subjectivization' into dialectical conversation with Ehrenberg's (2010) particular analysis of depression as 'weariness of the self', thereby giving us a synthetic formulation of the unhappy plight of the contemporary subject in the context of broader societal demands associated with changes in the nature of work and the neo-liberal social order.