Depressive Love

This book addresses the question of how it is possible for opposite emotional experiences such as love and depression to appear simultaneously, empirically documenting the phenomenon of depressive love and its implications through studies of art and the experiences of everyday life. Engaging with a range of sociological, psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of love, depression and emotion, the author examines the ways in which depressive love is expressed in modern society, asking whether it is a new phenomenon and confined to the West and if not, what is distinctive about the depressive love and its associated (dys)functions in contemporary Western society.