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The purpose of this communication is to consider some aspects of depressed mood in the morning. Such a consideration can account for a very wide range of depressed affect. This will include getting up on "the wrong side of the bed and feeling down in the dumps, " or "having the blues" for a few hours in the morning as well as the depression of the psychotic patient who so often has intolerable mornings. In the field of dreams and affects, this note will cover only two points of relationship: a theoretical consideration of depressed affect after waking and, affect as a consequence of thoughts and affects while sleeping.
Freud (8) in his "Mourning and Melancholia" discussed the clinical similarities as well as some important differences between grief and melancholia. In grief, following the actual loss of a loved object, a feeling of impoverishment and emptiness pervades, while in melancholia there is an emotional loss of the love object. "The melancholic displays an extraordinary fall of self-esteem, a loss of the ego: the ego itself seems poor and empty, and is inclined to self-reproaches." These states also have been considered by Abraham (1), (2), Rado (14), Federn (6), Edoardo Weiss (16), Edith Jacobson (10), and others. There are two major trends of thought in considering the mechanism of depression. These have been elaborated upon recently by Edward Bibring (3). He approaches