Images of depression in Charles Baudelaire: clinical understanding in the context of poetry and social history

Abstract

There is increasing recognition of the importance of the humanities and arts in medical and psychiatric training. We explore the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and its evocations of depression through themes of mood, time and self-consciousness and discuss their relation to images of ‘spleen’, the ‘snuffling clock’ and the ‘sinister mirror’. Following the literary critical commentaries of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Jean Starobinski (1920–2019) we identify some of their roots in the poet's experience of the rapid and alienating urbanisation of 19th-century Paris. Appreciation of the rich vocabulary of poetry and the images it generates adds depth to clinical practice by painting vivid pictures of subjective experience, including subjective experience of the ‘social’ as part of the biopsychosocial constellation.