The Loss Complex—A Contribution to the Etiology of Depression

The question of how early in psychic development depressive states evolve has given rise to a great deal of speculation in psychoanalysis. Abraham (1) recorded his finding that the occurrence of psychic depression was as widespread as anxiety. It still remains, however, to be established how early in human development anxiety emerges from its archaic forms of response to the perception of danger from without and to distress from within. Although at first depressive states were considered adult disorders, psychoanalysts have suggested that pathological depression affects the youngest children as well as the aged. The focus of research has naturally been placed on the youngest subjects in whom it is hoped the issue of etiology, genesis, and onset would be clarified. Despite extensive clinical experience, the chronology of the psychic processes in depression is still one of the most obscure fields of analytic theory.

The subject of this paper is that clinical depression, 2 a superego phenomenon, as we psychoanalytically understand the disorder, does not occur in childhood. Central to this problem is object loss which is universally regarded as a trauma. However, this is true only in its narrowest and most oversimplified sense. I shall attempt to show that it in fact produces a highly organized galaxy of sequential psychic phenomena which are best understood as a loss complex.3 It manifests itself in various ways at different phases