ABSTRACT
Depression is undoubtedly among the commonest of the complaints that bring therapists’ patients to tehm for help and from which they seek relief. Perhaps the most important diagnostic judgement in determining the particular kind of depression with which a patient presents has to do with the degree to which the depression has infiltrated the structure of the personality. H. Bleichmar, in a comprehensive review of the different types of depression and the various intrapsychic pathways that lead to their formation, distinguishes between depression that is a component part of many different kinds of disorder and depression as an entity in itself. S. Freud’s monumental work on mourning and its relation to clinical depression illuminated how the two conditions–the one usual, ordinary, commonplace, the other pathological–are closely related. This chapter shows that patients with a kind of severe, debilitating depression can be helped with intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
