This chapter analyzes mood disorders as disorders of implicit and explicit temporality. First, depression is conceived (a) as a desynchronization from intersubjective time, (b) as an inhibition of conation or basic drive. The inhibition results in a disturbance of cyclical bodily functions and in a retardation of lived time, manifested both in a loss of the future as a space of possibilities, and in a predomincance of the past in the form of accumulated guilt. Depressive delusions may then be described as beliefs which result from the freezing of self-temporalization and which resist an intersubjective alignment of perspectives. Further considerations are given to chronic depression and mania, the latter being described as the opposite type of desynchronization as compared to depression, namely an acceleration and partial decoupling of the inner time from the world time. Finally, consequences for a “resynchronizing therapy” are outlined.
