ABSTRACT
The developmental pathway of depression in its descriptive, dynamic, and genetic dimensions was laid down metapsychologically, and to some degree clinically, by Freud and Abraham in the early 1900s. At that time more or less every medical clinical entity touched by psychoanalysis yielded fascinating and ground-breaking psychological results, and depression, even though its existence as an af¯iction of the mind had been known for centuries, was no exception. Using these early contributions as starter points, this chapter will discuss how the phenomenon and meaning of depression is generally understood psychoanalytically. I shall begin with Freud's initial statement that depression is an inherent feature of the psychoanalytic theory of development. That is to say, depression is a natural occurrence and a living byproduct of the stages of infantile and adolescent development as described by psychoanalytic theory. In other words, depression, as with anxiety, is part of the fabric of mental growth. This will be situated in the context of Freud's classical drive theory in its account of how the mind is activated by the drives through a continuous tension between the demands of these drives and the demands of reality. My goal is to emphasize that during this maturational process depression is a secondary effect of the transformation of narcissism into object love, and to go on to give an account of this transformation within an object relations framework. I shall also be illustrating how the theory draws a distinction between a normal and a pathological or clinical depression. Put brie¯y, a normal depression has its basis in an average expectable transition from narcissism to object love, but where complications occur this becomes a neurotic depression, while a pathological depression re¯ects a serious obstruction in progressing from the stage of narcissism to object love where the outcome is a narcissistic depression. This analysis, in effect, is what Freud set out to do in `Mourning and melancholia' (1917) where he outlined the basics for an understanding
of the psychodynamics of these two forms of depression. This classic has served as the basic psychoanalytic text, and a point of departure, for all subsequent writings and innovations by psychoanalysts on the developmental pathway of depression.
