Lacan wrote that if you are trapped in the dream of the Other, you are effed.
A certain Lucifer Morningstar would nod and agree.
Here is Mr. Morningstar
I have been watching Lucifer at the behest of a friend who has been salivating over Tom Ellis for half a decade. If Ellis’ roguish charm was the gateway drug, then it were the parallels between depressive realism and the construct of “hell” that kept me hooked onto the show.
As my friend giggled to over the phone -
“You will find so much stuff to which you can relate as a psychologist and a Byung Chul Han fangirl!”
Not the first time someone drew comparisons between the not-so-bright Morning Star and my line of work and my being a Chul Han votary. For the purpose of this essay, I will avoid detouring too far into dissecting the series narratives, plot-lines, performances, camework or such. I am going to concentrate on certain symbolic representations that struck me as curious as I resisted and finally gave into the infinite charm of a certain Mr. Ellis’ tailormade casting in the titular role of Lucifer Morningstar.
(Some spoilers ahead!)
One of the more compelling metaphors of the show is one of “hell loops” - a place that is a moment in time where a departed soul is cast to their own personal infinity after death. It is a form of punishment where they are foreordained to repeat their “error” without the possibility of escape. Think of the butterfly effect meeting a Möbius strip. The hell loop demanded a faithful assay for its pitch perfect capture of how it mimics the spirals of depression like an infinity mirror: you are endlessly caged inside the image of an image where no separation seems possible.
While the show makes the usual references about the brimstone-and-poked-by-pitchforks sort of hell, the actual depiction of it is a lot more sombre, estranged and, ironically, more terrifying: a forbidding greyness that is so starkly companionless and everlasting. Hell is eternal loneliness. When I viewed it like that, the “sunken place” from Get Out instantly ricocheted in my mind. I thought about what someone suspended inside a passive hell loop might feel like. Except that in Get Out, a black person’s consciousness is forced to be suspended in paralysis while their body is inhabited by oppressors. It presented the reality of current day racism which sought to occupy the being in its bodily entirety.
The Sunken Place is a violation, a tyrannical occupation. The Hell Loop in Lucifer, on the other hand, is a punishment that is constituted as deserved, destined. I find myself drawn to the idea that these two representations when combined give us some visual definition of depression for a caste-oppressed, clinically labelled woman like me inside a less pathological and more psychosocial outline. You know the kind of depression that stems from poverty, cruelty, neglect, and the ceaseless dereliction of systemic violences. That seems to both be an outcome of abusive impairment but also its cause.
I think my depressive spirals most certainly manage to splice these two forms of torment. I witness the same thing happen in so many therapy clients/patients as well. There is a stuckedness. An unconsented yet weirdly committed miring to suffering that alternates between self-blame and distressing scrutiny of the ways in which the world rejects us.
The Stray Circle: A Repetition Compulsion
We lost two litters of stray pups we tried desperately to save earlier during the year. That is what got me binge-watching dramedies in the first place. A method for distraction. Early in 2023, I started feeding a newer group of street animals after a house help in my apartment complex pointed out that at a distance from my home is a cul de sac construction site dotted by a group of mangy strays. These kids were often seen hunting through a garbage dump for scraps. I visited the area and was immediately repulsed by the living conditions of these dogs. As an accidental stray animal feeder, it wasn’t new to this but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t dreadful. After a point, shock is replaced by rage in these situations. And then, you have to evacuate the rage to allow room for the will to change the condition in whatever little way you can.
What I learned over the next few months is how life is a study in both entropy and endurance. This is not the resilience of well-designed Instagram posts. Nor is it the resilience of forcing yourself to bear pain till your patience snaps like a glowstick. This was the slow, unhurried resilience of continuation after the catastrophe. You can sense that the catastrophe has altered your relationship with the world around you but you also don't want to allow it the power to flood you as permanent weather for your mind. Even though you do feel thoroughly defeated in that moment.
It was resilience subtracted from hope; a burning clarity that through the grief of burying these little bodies we were losing to disease or accident, we were supposed to return for those other little bodies that still clung to us for warmth and safety. I took my time. I found myself struggling with the growing terror I felt turning the corner towards the spot where we had erected the makeshift shelter. Not another one, I would mumble to myself peeking in to take count of the remaining puppies. I was very angry and somehow unlike the previous times in my life where this anger would have driven me to an emotional inertia, a shutdown in which I would submerge, this time the anger drove me towards seeking something else. Something that was, at that point, still unnameable. Under a video discussing shame, a youtube commenter wrote that his psychology professor considered Freud to be a great observer of human behaviour and a terrible explainer for it. Keeping that in mind, one of Freud’s more enduring concepts is that of a “repetition compulsion”.
Repetition compulsion is the mind’s agonizing and cryptic urge to replay the past, often the most painful parts, as if by revisiting old wounds we might somehow rewrite the ending. Freud referred to it as the unconscious drive to repeat patterns of suffering—returning to abusive relationships, reliving failures, recreating emotional neglect—not because it feels good, but because it feels familiar. In that sense, it indicates that we are more likely to circle the proximity of the known, even if it is detrimental than venture into the undiscovered that might relieve us of the aches knotted deep inside of us. Is this factually accurate for everyone who has suffered? No. The humanistic school of psychology eschewed such a steadfast commitment to determinism in favour of free will.
Determinism is the philosophical notion that every thought, action, and event is a domino tipped by prior causes, leaving little room for free will but plenty of room for existential frustration.
This contrasts sharply with the ideas promoted by existentialists and even some neo-Freudians that championed Nietzschean will to power.
They believed that this is the fundamental drive inherent in all life forms to assert, expand, and enhance their existence—not merely as a quest for survival, but as a striving for dominance, creativity, and self-overcoming. It transcends mere biological instinct, encompassing the desire to shape reality, exert influence, and impose meaning in an inherently chaotic world. Far from being a simple lust for control, it reflects a deeper existential force to evolve, innovate, and transform oneself and the world around us.
In his book “The Courage to Create”, existential psychologist Rollo May wrote -
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”
So what happens to this free will when it collides with a hardwired repetition compulsion?
More importantly, how do we imbibe this idea of “freedom” when we have either socially or individually or both felt subjugated for long periods in time.
A family that keeps you enmeshed and disallows you to become an individual. A parent that conditions you to believe that any measure of self-compassion is a betrayal towards them. A casteist, misogynistic and racist socioeconomic system that equates obedience with ethics and erects barriers to so much as understanding what freedom means, let alone exploring it.
In one of the episodes of Lucifer, the devil himself is unable to flee this fate. When he inadvertently stabs one of his own angelic siblings, his return to hell confines him to the exact event and place where the event occurs and he finds himself trapped in repeating and repenting. Till he reconciles with the fact that what has been done can’t be undone and he must start by forgiving himself.
Inside the theater of repetition compulsion, the unconscious, like a nettled playwright, keeps staging the same traumatic scenes in different guises, seeking resolution that never comes. The enormity of guilt, quietened anger and self-loathing combine to anesthetise the free will that liberates us.
I once wrote that depression feels like anger with its tongue cut out. Now I consider that statement to be a bit histrionic but somewhere deep within, I still identify with the core feeling contained within it.
When I rescue, foster and feed community animals, I am always amazed by their ability to trust again despite going through some of the most heart-wrenching hardships. They actively seek love, care and connection.
As I sat with a three-legged stray near my home, gently inspecting his ears for ticks, his head in my lap, I wanted to ask him - Do you not have repetition compulsion? Do you not get trapped in this circuit of pain?
It made me revisit Errica Berry’s essay on creaturely attunement which contained a stunning line - Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves.
Do we incline towards self-abandonment when we subconsciously relent to this repetition compulsion? Is it an example of our “unmooring from ourselves”.
The strays we rescue have experienced tremendous pain, and somehow, they don’t tether themselves to pain. They want to rush towards playfulness, joy, connection and freedom the moment they are brought to safety.
They want to form a pack. They are not thwarted by the doom of perishing in solitude. And even in Lucifer, the suave, silver-tongued, wounded devil ends up doing the same. Once on earth, he forms his pack. Not the vicious and mighty demon armies he once commandeered but a patchwork quilt of flawed, struggling and incomplete human beings who end up caring about him and he about them. People who might know the isolation of being banished from heaven by God, his righteous father, but certainly know a thing or two about dealing with demanding and insufferable parents.
So what happens is catharsis, I guess.
Community creates catharsis. The loop is interrupted when someone sees you. Hears you. Relates to you. You are witnessed and that witnessing is the kind of care that repairs.
In a tent of mirrors
Quite like in a tent of mirrors at a carnival, your self image shifts and transforms depending on the kind of mirror in which you see yourself. If my mirror was a dismissive spouse, the image shrunk, became bloodless and meager to fit his fantasies. If the mirror was a casteist boss, the image flattened itself and learned to be quiet, submissive and servile. If the mirror was an abusive stepfather, the image tried to obliterate itself until it could no more and then, swelled up into Medusa’s head. As they say, you can’t reach the unconscious by denying the serpents that guard it. In each, didn’t the mirror establish the face?
The depressed state doesn’t dissolve feelings, it just exiles them to this unreachable yet visible place. A lazaretto of found emotions, if you will. When the world is miserable, the mind mimics its misery. It is hard for me to convince people to absolve their distress in a therapy session knowing fully well that after the hour with me is over, they have to return to a marginalized environment or a turbulent home where they don’t hold a tremendous amount of power to direct change.
In the Pedagogy of the Hope, Paulo Freire wrote a paragraph that follows me around like a second shadow -
“No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile—not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who had said it”
The hell loops vary in their dimensions and depths. But, they do trap you within their metronomes, a fly fated to buzz inside a jar for an indefinite period in time. Thats the repetitive chant of a depressive spiral. It is not a fact but it is a fog of feelings that originates from very real and very terrible experiences.
The 30 something years old career woman who manages to dredge up empathy for everyone in her life except herself is bent like a question mark on the bedroom floor. She is trying to solve the painfully incomprehensible puzzle of her mother choosing abusive men over her all through her childhood.
The 40 something years old mild-mannered man in the earliest stages of a contested divorce who stares at the switched off TV for hours questioning why he stayed in a loveless and toxic marriage for as long as he did.
We have a nursery in our home. Animals saunter about without threat. Cats, dogs, even the odd rat. Last fall when the rats decided to get too amorous and multiplied at aggressive speeds, we had to cast aside our tenderness for a brief minute to tackle the population. We wanted to plainly move them to a mini forest-like area not too far away from the home where they have abundant natural food. Thus began the arduous task of trying to trap them without killing them. Different methods, contraptions and persistence levels were tested in the process.
We paused all of it when one of the surveillance cameras caught the predicament of a trapped rat who first tried to escape the ambush with all its might and failing that, just went limp. Even when we tried to move it out and set it free, it stayed inside the cage. It almost seemed like it had resigned itself to its consequence. Except, I don’t know if rats believe in fate. So I assume what it felt resigned to, was its state. In human beings, the depressed position blurs the line between fate and state.
I have never felt more kinship with an animal as I did with that rat in that moment. A lot of times I have questioned whether being depressed is something I am resigned to; a state of being that has become native to me. Or is it something that was destined for me given where I was born, to whom and in what body I inhabit the world.
In the Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (2nd Edition), Dr Nancy McWilliams states tht introjectively depressive people often handle their unconscious dynamics by helping others, by philanthropic activity, or by contributions to social progress that have the effect of counteracting their guilt.
And that is why I keep collecting the companionships of rats, cats, dogs, owls, crows and the occasional snake. An abridged interpretation could be that I am trying to rescue myself through them because in my own spirals of suffering, my feeling of empathy towards self remains quarantined. Sometimes, I feel like I am misguided in my flagrant attempts to save them because I am delaying mourning the loss of those parts of myself that I can never reclaim and must let go of.
If you don’t take time to mourn the loss of a dream, you are trapped in the nightmare of “fixing” it.
Melancholy, Sadness or a Third Completely Different Thing
When I speak to clients in therapy, I help them understand that self-identifying psychological conditions must take into account the spectrum on which we experience emotions. Not all sadness is depressive. Not all depression is sadness. There is melancholic depression, repetitive self-loathing emerges as both a symptom and a symbol—a looping narrative of despair orchestrated by the mind’s architecture and its unconscious depths. Neuroscientifically, the default mode network (DMN)—responsible for self-referential thought—becomes hyperactive and untethered, pulling the individual into involuntary spirals of introspection dominated by self-criticism and regret. Simultaneously, reduced connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and limbic structures, like the amygdala, impairs emotional regulation, allowing raw, unfiltered emotions to amplify negative thought patterns.
Psychoanalysis offers an equally haunting explanation: the unconscious, shaped by unresolved conflicts and early relational wounds, weaponizes the superego—that harsh internalized voice of authority—into a tyrant. This internal critic, as Freud described, feeds on repressed anger turned inward, leading to a masochistic cycle of self-punishment. Attachment theory further deepens this understanding, showing how early attachment ruptures can fracture the foundations of self-worth, transforming external neglect or rejection into a distorted internal dialogue of inadequacy. As the individual ruminates, the brain, in its maladaptive attempt to solve pain, instead reinforces it—like a needle stuck on the same mournful note. Depression, then, is not just a chemical imbalance or a cognitive distortion; it is a complex entanglement of neural dysfunction, psychic wounds, and a self that becomes both the prisoner and the warden of its own suffering.
I, for instance, have what is often labelled “Major Depressive Disorder”.
The “I have” in this sentence puzzles me because it almost seems to indicate that this is a possession, an article or an inheritance of mine.
Evidence-based theory of “The Negative Cognitive-Affective Loop” posits that depressive spirals result from a self-reinforcing loop between negative thoughts, emotions, and neural activity in specific brain regions. The repetitive nature of depressive spirals in MDD is driven by dysregulated neural circuits, particularly the DMN, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. These brain regions interact in a way that traps individuals in cycles of negative thoughts and emotions, making it challenging to recover without targeted treatment.
I sit and sift through fMRI snapshots of my brain. The areas for neural activity look like a heat map for a volcano or a forest fire. It is incredible how much the wirings of the human brain resemble the larger geography of this planet. As fascinating as these grief maps might be, they don’t really answer the question - ok so what now?
In “Denial of Death”, Ernesh Becker wrote that beyond a given point [we are] not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.
Lucifer’s most constant confidante is not his love interest but the woman who accidentally becomes his psychotherapist. She is the one who handles his “real” face with a lot more gravitas even when she is initially repulsed by the truth of his identity. She listens and occasionally nudges him to pause and reflect on his choices. To not just mindlessly ramrod his way into the what next before asking but why along the way.
When the “Devil” is forced to return to Hell in barter for saving the ones he loves the most, he is seen conducting a group therapy session with some nefarious candidates from previous episodes who have met their unsightly ends. The place where he does this is his own therapist’s office. He seems to be encouraging them to untether from their own hell loops in order to find peace before closing the “session”.
Our hell loops are not infinite. They are just knotted at certain points in such a way that they seem so to us. Radical acceptance is a way to unknot. If you imagined yourself a spirited cat and pulled at one end of this infinity, you’d unravel it forcing it to open itself.
To live is to confront. Self. Other.
And when you confront your pain, your grief, your stuckedness, you allow your world to be uplifted by caring courage. Or courageous care.
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