‘Nothing to be done’ (Beckett 2012: 11). Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot is not about healthcare, but its first line seems to hover between prognosis and diagnosis, suggesting that some kind of existential ‘doctoring’ is afoot, even as it is clear that no prescriptions are going to be dispensed. For the play’s two central characters, Vladimir and Estragon, ‘nothing to be done’ empties out the urgency of curative political action from Vladimir Lenin’s famous question: ‘What is to be done?’ Every possibility of change on the horizon of the play is derailed by the inertia of the fixing refrain: ‘we’re waiting for Godot’. Waiting is the nothing that famously happened twice (Mercier 1956: 6), and came to be figured, in many early critical receptions of Beckett, as a representation of the existential human condition (Graver and Federman 1979). In the early 1950s, when the play was first performed, perhaps abstractions were more available for critical absorption than the possibility that postwar Europe was still in a present denuded of an inhabitable future (Kenner 1973: 133; Gibson 2010: 108) – an endless time of living on without any real hope of change in the wake of an unspecified disaster. Beckett’s play materializes a waiting that becomes a form of endurance through the promise of what might come to change the present for there is always some orientation towards the future in such practices. But the clear unavailability of Godot decouples the for (Schweizer 2008: 11), the most obvious preposition or relation, from the action of waiting. Neither weak enough to cease and desist nor strong enough to leave, Vladimir and Estragon endure and persist, not, in the end, waiting for Godot but waiting with and sometimes even on one another. Although in this chapter we will pay close attention to existential claims about the place of waiting in human experience, we will suggest that waiting is significantly shaped by the promises and narratives of particular historical moments and lifeworlds, and their distinct ways of understanding time. Indeed, if tarrying in Godot’s waiting room seems to speak to the existential human condition, we would argue that it is because the audiences the play found and continues to find persist in a time when the promises of the future feel increasingly unavailable. Godot’s characters, alongside their audiences, wait with their diagnosis, which is also their prognosis: ‘nothing to be done’.

Perhaps one reason the slow modernism of Godot found and made its mark so sharply was its insistence on attending to the disavowed underside of the dominant timescapes of modernity. In 1931, Aldous Huxley was able to state that ‘[s]peed […] provides the one genuinely modern pleasure’ (Huxley 2001: 263), and it has been a critical commonplace to read aesthetic modernism as a reflection of the shock of the new and a pacing, racing present. Planes, trains, and automobiles; ragtime and jazz; epiphanies and revolutions; telegraphs and telephones; production lines and new mass media: humanities scholarship has thoroughly mined how the modernity of the early and mid-twentieth century produced, for better and worse, accelerated lives and shaped technologies capable of both registering and increasing sensations of speed (Duffy 2009). Engaged with a more contemporary moment and less concerned with aesthetic practices, Paul Virilio (2006) has described how a logic of acceleration that has compressed, foreshortened, and fractured time still sits at the heart of modernity and its drives towards destruction; while Jonathan Crary (2013) has critiqued a culture of 24/7 availability fuelled by unsleeping technologies that has turned even the slowing of rest into an act of embodied resistance.

But there were always other times folded into the modern, as Elisabeth Kirtsoglou and Bob Simpson’s idea of ‘chronocracy’ suggests (this volume). For example, the managed and mechanized time of the working classes in a newly industrialized Europe was consistently used to service a version of a progressive future that was not shaped in their interests (Thompson 1967). Craig Jeffery has also identified ‘chronic, fruitless waiting’ (Jeffery 2010: 3) as a particular temporal experience of those colonized populations who provided much of the material resources for acceleration of Empire and modernity, noting it as a prominent feature of the experience of subaltern peoples globally since the 1960s. Bendixsen and Eriksen indeed point out that for certain groups waiting can be an expression of power and domination, generating vulnerability and humiliation (2018: 92). And while a ‘new chronic’ temporal imaginary has become more generally palpable in the late liberalism of the contemporary global north (Cazdyn 2012), many of the most acute experiences of ‘chronic, fruitless waiting’ remain ‘zoned’ in specifically gendered, raced, and classed ways. As Lisa Baraitser has argued in Enduring Time (2017), despite an ever-increasing sense of acceleration, because the spooling of time towards a possible future seems to have come unravelled in the contemporary moment, experiences of interruption, suspension, delay, and slowness strongly insist in affective life in highly differential ways.

Here, however, we track this sense of time enduring rather than passing back to an earlier moment in the twentieth century, noting the ways in which waiting uncoupled from a future into which one might step came to be understood as a key feature of the affective condition termed ‘melancholia’, or, in its more contemporary configuration, ‘depression’. This is not to claim that either condition is simply a response to modern times or, more strongly still, a social construction; nor is it to seek to medicalize distress that may be the result of other social relations of inequality or injustice (Thomas et al. 2018). Rather, we are interested in exploring how understandings of melancholia in twentieth-century Europe came to be focalized through particular ideas and sensations of stuck, suspended, impeded, or ungraspable time that shaped and continue to mould the contours of the temporal landscapes and psychological imaginaries of (late) modernity. Furthermore, we argue that care in the context of depression, which we understand as imbricated with psychosocial relations and experiences and therefore ‘more than biomedical’ or psychological in constitution (Hinchliffe et al. 2018), may turn out to hinge around the offer and use of extended periods of time and the capacity to stay with those whose experience is that of a temporality that no longer flows.

Although the disciplinary perspective here is not anthropological, our concern with examining melancholia and depression through experiences and practices of waiting brings our chapter into contact with an important body of anthropological literature. In his interdisciplinary volume, Ghassen Hage describes waiting as an experience that is always both existential and historically articulated or situational (Hage 2009: 4, 6). Manpreet Janeja and Andreas Bandak similarly suggest that analysing waiting requires a capacity to shuttle between existential and more clearly social or institutional perspectives, as they demonstrate how focussed ethnographic work can illuminate both waiting’s poetics and its politics (Janeja and Bandak 2018: 3). But this chapter uses a more dispersed, eclectic, and textual archive of experience to open up a theoretical account of melancholia/depression as a condition fundamentally entangled with existential, cultural, and socio-historical experiences and theorisations of European (late) modernity. Remaining broadly within the climate of these anthropological approaches to waiting, however, we propose that the remarkable tradition of phenomenological psychiatry from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provides a significant opportunity to trace the relationship between accounts of lived experience of mental distress that emerged explicitly alongside existential philosophies, and more broadly socio-historical accounts of time.

As time became a topic of intense debate across the sciences and arts and humanities in early twentieth century Europe and North America, multiple disciplines explored the tension between accounts of intuitive/subjective time and understandings of mathematical/objective time (Fryxell 2019: 5–6). Phenomenological psychiatry established its distinctive approach in this context by refusing the dominant third-person approach to psychopathology exemplified by Emil Kraepelin (Broome et al. 2012: 90) in favour of paying careful attention to the first person, subjective experience of disruptions of well-being. The discipline was profoundly influenced by the new philosophies of temporality of Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger in the first three decades of the twentieth century and one of its key insights was that chronic mental distress can be understood as a disturbance of a sense of lived time. However, phenomenological psychiatry paid scant explicit attention to the temporal demands of treatment (Fryxell 2019: 23) – the time bound up in the intersubjectivity of the clinical encounter or simply the time that treatment takes. But psychoanalysis, which emerged alongside phenomenological psychiatry in historical terms, insisted on reflecting, with particular self-consciousness, on the complex, often seemingly interminable temporality of treatment (Freud 1937).

Both phenomenological psychiatry and psychoanalysis developed in explicit dialogue with the conditions of modernity and alongside the devastating experiences of industrialized warfare, but while phenomenology negatively articulated a temporal attitude of normalcy that recedes in experiences of mental illness, psychoanalysis used the rhythms of psychopathology and the inevitability of falling ill as a way of illuminating the structures of all mental life and of a psychic life of time that can never be simply linear, teleological, or smoothly flowing. Instead of suggesting that sensations of waiting without a for break apart what is proper to lived time, psychoanalysis comes to understand such experiences to be part of the inevitable conditions of psychic life. Psychoanalysis thus offers up a specifically chronic cure – the offer of time and care, and of remembering, repeating and working through (Freud 2014) – to contain, understand, and ameliorate the chronic condition of mental distress. By highlighting this link between the chronicity of the mind and the broader psychosocial contexts in which endurance plays out, this paper aims to open up a historically nuanced sense of the value of psychoanalytic temporal practices of waiting not for but with. We also suggest that by attending specifically to the relationships between depression, temporality, and historical and psychosocial experience, the urgent debates about uses of time in contemporary mental healthcare delivered by the UK’s National Health Service might tentatively be reframed.