ABSTRACT
Established by Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalytic extended case report continues to be one of the most important forms of communication in international psychoanalysis, albeit such reports have rarely been published in international journals of psychoanalysis. In psychoanalytic literature reference is frequently made to the connection between depression and trauma. Contemporary psychoanalysts and psychiatrists agree that only a multifactor model is capable of doing justice to the complex and always very individual causes leading into a depression. H. B. Bleichmar, a senior clinical psychoanalytic researcher on depression, has developed a model which recognises the multiple paths through which a person proceeds from one circuit, as dominated by one factor, to another when becoming depressed. S. Suomi has shown that undoing the separation trauma in baby monkeys might “undo” the neurobiological and behavioural damages once again—clearly, a revolutionary finding for all forms of early prevention and for psychoanalytic treatments.
