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To our surprise a person may come out of a depression stronger, wiser and more stable than before he or she went into it.
Self-preservation for modern man means keeping the symbolic self intact. Fundamentally this involves his being able to receive and process messages accurately, and to understand and orient himself to their significance.
Clinical and ethological conviction that discrete affect expressions are adaptive and that they represent an early and continuing significant form of communication has received experimental support.
This paper describes how certain behaviour patterns tend to prevent affect and process of depression from facilitating adaptation. Its point of departure is the position that the capacity to respond to specific circumstances with the affect of depression is not only universal but adaptive unless unfavourable events during the most formative years have interfered with normal personality development.
In general, with some exceptions in psychoanalytic literature and in multidisciplinary research as reported by Izard (1972), the study of clinical depression often lacks this point of view which is more readily applied to other categories of emotional disturbance. Wanton destructiveness, for instance, is recognized as a consequence of faulty personality development or of other damaging influences that distort the expression of a vital normal affect. Sexual deviation is also seen as a consequence of a development that interferes with the course of a vital normal function. In contrast, symptoms of clinical depression are rarely measured against any model of normal depression. The question how and when depression serves an indispensable adaptive function and therefore is a sign of normal development is not raised. Thus, there is no general agreement on such a model, although Freud and/or Klein are often assumed to have provided one.