ABSTRACT
General interest in the psycho-analytic psychopathology of depression may have been kept in the background for a long time, owing to the rapid development of interest in the psychopathological understanding of the less complex symptoms common in neurosis, such as anxieties, phobias, obsessions, etc. The psychopathology of schizophrenic symptoms where the mechanisms sometimes seemed obvious and apparent, but where psycho-analytic treatment was not then helpful, interested more analysts in the early days than did the psychopathology of manic-depressive symptoms. Nevertheless since 1911, when Abraham first discussed depression, the psycho-analytic psychology of normal sorrow, depression, mourning, and grief, and the psychopathology of abnormal depressions have gradually developed until now concepts have been worked out which are to a considerable degree new and can be stated simply. Such new concepts have been found to be of essential value in psycho-analytic attempts at investigation and therapy of depressed states regardless of the degree of severity, regardless of the sex, and more or less regardless of the age—children as young as two and one-quarter and adults in the sixth decade having been treated.
