The Anchorite as Analysand: Depression and the Uses of Analogy

Abstract

Contemporary scholars sometimes analogize premodern acedia to modern depression, finding promise in ancient therapies for acedia—chiefly forms of bodily activity and mental discipline. This article identifies an alternative model of medieval ascetic therapy in a brief passage in Ancrene Wisse in which a mother playfully hides from her child, who is left to cry alone until she returns and embraces him. The scene, later dubbed “the play of love,” is presented as a similitude illustrating God’s withdrawal from the anchorite, which is experienced as the depressive state known to medieval thinkers as sterilitas mentis. Although it belongs to a long tradition on the benefits of temptation, the play of love also serves an immediate therapeutic end, allowing the anchorite to conceptualize her solitary suffering as part of an ongoing relation with a complex God. The form of the similitude, which facilitates identification across difference, is crucial to this process. Though the play of love operates differently from the therapeutic modes that emerge from other work comparing acedia and depression, it underlines the value of the analogy in the first place, whatever the risks of anachronism.

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