ABSTRACT
Every time the author starts an analytic treatment with a patient showing clear symptoms of depression and deals with doubts concerning the psychoanalytic theorisations about depression, starting from the writings of Abraham and Freud up to the present. Analytic work supports and develops the capacity to deal with psychic pain and the frustration caused by life situations. Depression can strike at any time in the life cycle, according to the studies mentioned in Northoff, and psychodynamic imbalance also becomes a disorder of the systems that implies an involvement of concentric circles in both the subcortical and cortical areas of the brain. From the account of the clinical case, one can assume a path, dream after dream, that allowed the patient to go through grief and move away from depression to finally come to a good, integrated, psychosomatic–neurovegetative functioning in the dream.
