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TO THE DEPRESSIVE PERSON may be applied Thoreau's statement about those who lead lives of quiet desperation. A covert quiet and inarticulateness may run deep in someone who is, in the eyes of the world and in terms of his public self, functioning well. Such an individual who comes to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy citing various difficulties in living other than depression, is experienced by us as presenting great "resistance."
Though every kind of personality and every psychopathologic syndrome has its characteristic communication pattern, difficulties in communication play a particular role in the depressive patient—they form part of what he suffers from and they contribute to the barrier between him and others, between him and his therapist. The disorders of communication have made many depressive patients "unanalyzable, " or, more accurately put, have baffled therapy, and, indeed, have often been one basic reason for the selection of one mode of therapy over another. The enterprise of psychotherapy depends on the establishment of communication with the patient for its feasibility and involves repair of the disordered communication processes as one of its therapeutic goals.
Such repair of communication demands of the psychotherapist a wider repertoire of modes of communication with the patient than in the traditional delineation of the role of psychoanalyst and there are processes and activities on the part of the therapist that affect essentially his participation in communication and his interaction with the patient. We have learned this about the therapist-schizophrenic patient interplay, and it is no surprise to find that such is the case in the therapeutic relationship with the depressive patient. The