ABSTRACT
In Chapter 13 I introduced the subject of depression with a patient in whom the main problem was loss and miscarried grief, though with hints of ambivalent feelings towards the loved people who had died. From this I went on to review other patients in whom the element of ambivalence was more prominent. The most striking of these was the Daughter with a Stroke, who clearly could not face the tangled emotions of love, grief, hate, relief, and guilt, surrounding the death of her dominating and controlling mother. This led on to patients such as the Divorced Mother and the Farmer's Daughter, where the loss was not through death, but through rejection by a lover, a situation to which ambivalence is intrinsic. All these examples still leave out of account another kind of loss or rejection, which is almost certainly the most important single root cause of depression, namely maternal deprivation.
