Psychopathology I: Neurotic-Level Character and Symptom Disorders

Second Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2022-23, 3rd Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Michael Pauly, MD
Kelly Lippman, LMHC

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April 21, 2023 — Depression

[48 pages]

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud introduces many concepts. Most pertinent to this class is his distinguishing mourning (grief) from melancholia (depression) by the over identification with the lost object and related diminishment in the regard for the self during times of loss. Please bring clinical material of your own.

McWilliams’ clear writing style serves as a great introduction to the experience of depression and to understand its differentiation from mourning, masochism, and depleted-type narcissism.

Given the complexity and importance of understanding the concepts in Mourning and Melancholia I have included Ogden’s paper in which he gives his analysis and extends his thinking to show how Freud’s paper served as the beginning of an object relations theory.  Ogden shares dream and clinical material from a patient of his to reveal the “frozen quality of the melancholic’s unconscious internal object world”. This paper is optional.

Freud, S. (1917). “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, pp237-258.

Read pages 243-258

McWilliams, N. (2011) Ch 11, “Depressive and Manic Personalities” in Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (2nd Edition), pp235-266.

Optional Reading

Ogden, T. (2002). A New Reading of the Origins of Object-Relations Theory, Int J of Psychoanalysis, 83:767-782.