ABSTRACT
The fact that Sophie Freud quite often saw depressive patients is evident from his "neurasthenia project", planned at the beginning of 1893. The idealisation of the son's relationship with the mother and the neglect of the early mother relationship have now been noted by a number of authors and attributed to Freud's own early development and traumas. Freud saw mainly the narcissistic identification, the assimilation of the ego to the object, the alteration of the ego and the conflict in the ego. In addition, in "Mourning and Melancholia" he discussed at length the ambivalence and sadism of the depressive. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud referred to the importance of narcissistic identification and drew attention to the conflict, specific to depression, between the ego ideal and the ego.
