Henri Saint-Simon: His Ideology and Personality

Ever since Abraham,1 writing in 1911, called attention to the probable role of “anger” in the ambivalent response of the melancholic personality, psychoanalytically oriented theories of depression have emphasized the centrality of repressed hostility in melancholia. Freud2 and numerous other investigators3-7 have elaborated Abraham's original insight by proposing a variety of interpretations, ranging from superego formulations to dependency-separation models to formulas based on loss of self-esteem. More recently, cognitive theorists such as Seligman8 have attempted to demonstrate experimentally the phenomenon of “learned helplessness” as a key factor in depression, building on the earlier clinical work of Bibring9 and others. Thus, interpretations of depression have moved toward an emphasis on frustration and failure, and away from Freud's concept of unconscious rage at an introjected and no-longer-available love object. It is possible that this shift in emphasis reflects a change in methodology, as well as a theoretical departure along the lines suggested by Fenichel.4

The older psychoanalytic model was based on a developmental view of depression, and its analysis was concentrated on the phenomenon of loss-of-dependency-through-separation – essentially a childhood trauma, although not exclusively so, as shown in studies of adult bereavement.10 The cognitive view of depression, with its focus on the sense of personal failure, is based on a methodology of studying reactions to experimentally induced frustration. Its strength is that it seeks to reconstruct the conditions under which individuals experience loss of motivation in general, and impaired resourcefulness in particular. Although cognitive psychologists have been slow to distinguish between failures associated with real ego-involvement and other types of frustration (and even less energetic in exploring the significance of individual differences in response to failure), it is clear that the perception of life