Anxiety of being oneself became weariness of being oneself

Evidence

In French psychoanalysis in particular, depression was regarded as a symbolic collapse: the difficulty in experiencing conflict weakened the identifying mechanisms needed to structure an identity that could live with such conflict. The style of despair changed along with the style of hope. The anxiety of being oneself morphed into the weariness of being oneself. This was the guise our inner constraints now assumed as a new age for the individual was taking shape. — Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self, 621

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Single aphoristic couplet — ‘the anxiety of being oneself morphed into the weariness of being oneself’ — distills the entire chapter, and arguably the book, into a formulation that resists paraphrase.
• STORYSTEM: The shift from anxious striving to weary inertia is a natural spine for a character study.
• XREF: connects to: SSRIs affect the personality, crossing from disease to lifestyle — Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing…, 868; The loss of individual personality can itself become an identity

Broader Connections

• The loss of individual personality can itself become an identity #expands (0.75)