Over the past few decades, psychoanalysis and dynamic psychiatry have been steadily stepping back from a key role in the understanding and treatment of depressive disorders. This book investigates the basis for such retreat by delving into the history of medicine, philosophy, religion, and literature. It unveils the social motives for the overwhelming consensus currently gathered by the biomedical model of depression. The book then moves on to discuss at depth psychoanalytic literature on depression and reveals how it possesses an enormous explanatory power for depression symptoms. This approach allows the author to offer readers a comprehensive, dynamically-oriented model of symptom formation in depression.

By Paolo Azzone

Prefatory Note
Acknowledgments
Part I: Historical Facts: Depression and Other Socially Shared Representations of Pain in Western Civilization
Chapter One: Sadness and Black Bile
Chapter Two: Sadness, Error and Sin
Chapter Three: Sadness and Human Societies
Part II: Clinical Facts
Chapter Four: Looking through a Distortive Mirror: Descriptive Psychopathology of Depression from a Psychoanalytic Perspective
Chapter Five: Encountering Depression in the Context of Mental Health Services: The Contribution from Psychoanalytic Literature
Part III: The Model
Chapter Six: A Model of the Process of Formation of Depressive Symptoms
Chapter Seven: Epistemological Observations
References