title: Psychoanalytic observations on the pathology of depressive illness: selected spheres of ambiguity or disagreement.
abstract: This paper has two general sources: my own clinical psychoanalytic work extending over about four and one half decades; and consideration of certain outstandingly influential ideas in our literature: first, those of the pioneer contributors, and then those of certain more recent writers, whose views have sometimes exhibited important differences from those widely held in the past. I try to evaluate the two groups--in their occasional overlapping and important divergences, in relation to my own clinical experience. A certain general position of my own emerges from such process inevitably; but it is far from "revolutionary." Indeed, the contrary is more largely true. In extreme anticipatory condensation--what I do propose, from my own reflections, is the preeminent importance of an archaic characterological core in depressive illness.
mesh_terms: D000374:Aggression; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006117:Grief; D006801:Humans; D007207:Individuation; D007989:Libido; D008297:Male; D009289:Narcissism; D009769:Object Attachment; D009913:Oral Stage; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D012649:Self Concept