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THE HUMAN PSYCHE IS SO COMPLEX that it is impossible to tease out individual factors and demonstrate that they alone produce certain psychic configurations. Overdeterminism is the rule. In this paper, I shall concentrate on the role of early separation from parents and its influence on depression and masochism. Inevitably, I shall supplement the too-simple picture that emerges with an outline of other determinants. I shall indicate briefly the role of oedipal guilt (Freud, 1924); (Brenner, 1959), the observation of the primal scene (Freud, 1905), the need to gratify sadistic parents (Berliner, 1947); (Bernstein, 1957) and the mechanisms of control of dangerous objects and drives (Panel, 1956); (Loewenstein, 1957); (Eidelberg, 1968); (Panel, 1981).
In referring to depression, I am including the affect of sadness (with its ideational and feeling aspects and physiological concomitants) and the diagnoses, often labeled depression, in which that affect appears. The diagnoses include reactive depression, endogenous depression, mourning, grief, and melancholia. By masochism I mean a clinical condition in which