This paper has two general sources: (1) my own clinical psychoanalytic work extending over about four and one half decades; and (2) consideration of certain outstandingly influential ideas in our literature: first, those of the pioneer contributors, and then those of certain more recent writers, whose views have sometimes exhibited important differences from those widely held in the past. I try to evaluate the two groups—in their occasional overlapping and important divergences, in relation to my own clinical experience. A certain general position of my own emerges from such process inevitably; but it is far from "revolutionary." Indeed, the contrary is more largely true. In extreme anticipatory condensation—what I do propose, from my own reflections, is the preeminent importance of an archaic characterological core in depressive illness.