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so-called stress hormone, floods our bodies in the morning, waking us up, and drains out of them at night, allowing us to relax. An unhappy evening can disrupt the rhythm of cortisol release,making it hard for us to sleep, which can, in turn, make us depressed or exacerbate our already fragile grip on reality. Melatonin is the hormone that ensures a normal sleep-wake cycle. Usually we make melatonin at night. But if night disappears as a result of indoor lighting our glands won’t know when it’s time to start working, and we’ll have more sleep problems.
    Most of these biological rhythms have roughly a twenty-four-hour cycle, though some, like menstruation, have a monthly cycle, and some correspond to the seasons. There are also what are known as circaseptan, or about-weekly, rhythms, although so far more of these have been spotted in small marine creatures than in people. Medical studies have uncovered seven-day patterns in blood pressure and migraines, though it is unclear whether these are rooted in social experience or genomes—one study found that people have fewer migraines on Sunday than on any other day of the week. Sociologists and psychiatrists have spotted many seven-day behavioral patterns—suicides famously skyrocket on Mondays; dreams tend to incorporate images a week old or less—but these patterns mirror social realities, not the activity of our cells. Depressives kill themselves on Mondays because the workday’s seemingly unmanageable routines drown them in despair. We file short-term memories in seven-day chunks because that’s how we’re used to thinking.
    Chronobiology may be on the verge of proving that the week exists in nature, but for the moment the seven-day cycle remains a social unit of time—in a way, the very first. The week was the first temporal division not tethered to the sun or the moon. It was the first calendrical algorithm, rolling forward into the future according to its own logic and with no regard for the rotations of the astral bodies. “So long as man marked his life only by the cycles of nature,” the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “he remained a prisoner of nature. If he was to go his own way and fill his world with human novelties, he would have to make his own measures of time.”
    If the week is a socially constructed measure of time, then when people get sick every Sunday their illness is probably not a biologicaldisorder. It’s a reaction to Sunday itself. But what about the day provokes this reaction? “Sunday is the holiday of present-day civilized humanity,” Ferenczi explained. What made Sunday civilized, he declared, was that it was bacchanalian. To illustrate this paradox, Ferenczi imagined a Sunday that a person might spend with friends and family. (You have to remember how literary and whimsical psychoanalysts allowed themselves to be in those days.) His illustrative fantasy is very fin de siècle, very late Austro-Hungarian empire. It involves a picnic in the mountains, where “everything is permissible.” Adults disport themselves like children. The children get wild and spiral out of control. But not every adult will enjoy his “holiday wantonness.” Hilarity, in the Sunday neurotic, prompts self-loathing, not release. He clamps down on himself, and his urges spill out as symptoms. During the other days of the week, a busy schedule and strict codes of behavior keep dark feelings in check. On Sunday, when time loses its structure and conventions relax, they emerge.
    Aha! I thought. So the goyim twist their freedom into a curse, too! But then I read on, and noticed something strange. Aside from this one made-up Sunday, Ferenczi bases his diagnosis entirely on a single example set not on Sunday but on Friday night: a Jewish patient who remembered that, as a little boy, he vomited every Sabbath eve. His family blamed the fish they usually had for dinner, but Ferenczi had another theory. “It is known that for religious Jews on Friday night, it is