“’Sunday Neuroses’ that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest”
(Frankl, 1946, p. 112).
For some years now I’ve hated Sundays. Especially anytime after two or three PM. By Sunday night a sense of foreboding or dread reaches ‘clinically significant’ levels. When I was younger, Sunday night seemed an abrupt transition from that pit stop called the weekend. The return of school in the morning was dreaded. Once more into the breach. What was the resistance to Mondays and the school week transformed into distaste for Mondays and the work week.
Luckily there is a term for this: Sunday Neurosis. The Hungarian psycho-analyst Sandor Ferenczi described in 1919 how his patients seemed to be more symptomatic on Sundays (some early analyses were conducted six days a week). Twenty-five years later, the Viennese analyst Viktor Frankl also referred to the Sunday Neurosis as a symptom of existential emptiness when one faces the lack of structure and identity that the work-a-day world creates and maintains in an individual. I do not believe I suffer from this form of Sunday Neurosis, or its synonymous condition—the Weekend Syndrome. I think I just have a neurosis that is most prevalent on Sundays. Since I am a psychologist and shrinks are good for creating jargon and terms that suggest nothing but a stab at self-importance, I will coin a new term—the negative Sunday neurosis.
Whereas in the conventional use of the term, the Sunday Neurosis describes a sense of anxiety around a lack of meaning in one’s life; the negative Sunday neurosis (‘negative’ in this case refers to a converse or opposite scenario) is a sense of dread that the work-a-day world has little or no source of meaning and identity-making and impinges upon sources of meaning. Then the question immediately arises, why don’t you get a new job? Good question. But I am not sure that the work is the problem and I do not sense I have an aversion to work (I work hard and once I’m in the workweek, it’s non-stop from Monday to Friday and usually spilling over). Then is it exhaustion? That sounds like such a wimpy word. “He had to take a rest cure in the country for his nervous exhaustion.” Perhaps the transition from potential space in the weekends to the structures of the work-week is a difficult navigation between productive leisure and obligatory production.
Leisure is hard work it seems.
“As we have seen earlier, human beings feel best in flow, when they are fully involved in meeting a challenge, solving a problem, discovering something new. Most activities that produce flow also have clear goals, clear rules, and immediate feedback—a set of external demands that focuses our attention and makes demands on our skills. Now these are exactly the conditions most often lacking in free time . . . free time with nothing specific to engage one’s attention provides the opposite of flow: psychic entropy, where one feels listless and apathetic” (Csikszentmihaly, 1997, p. 66)
I suppose that’s why most of my so-called down-time is spent writing or doing art-work. The time I could spend being social has been earmarked for art and words which leaves me little in the way of hanging out with other people. On the one hand, I get the satisfaction of artistic creation; on the other, unsavory isolation.
And then, of course, comes a case of the Mondays.
Csikszentmihaly, M. (1997). Finding Flow. New York: Basic.
Frankl, V. (1946/1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Ilse Lasch [trans.] Boston: Beacon. [originally translated as From Death Camp to Existentialism from the original German Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager]
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