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THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF DEPRESSION, as I view them, are set forth in other publications 1234 from which a passage will suffice to summarize: 2
A basic, unifying formulation for understanding the psychological forces that generate and constitute depression is that depression is a practice. The view that depression is not a passive, intrapsychic response to external or endogenous circumstances, but an active way of relating interpersonally may also serve well as a guiding concept for dealing with the condition psychotherapeutically.
The dynamics of depression are obscured by attempts to define a pre-morbid character. The illness is not a supervening emotional response which inhibits tendencies to 'normal' functioning. On the contrary, depressive symptomatology, varying in intensity from sulk to psychosis, is a consistent reflection of the basic pathologic functioning of the personality. Anger, in part a response to the frustration of the functioning and in part an implementation of it, is a central element of depression.
It would, I feel, be a distortion to regard a patient's homosexuality as disqualifying him in our attempt to understand depression. There is no such thing as a pure depression. Depression involves a broad range of feeling, conceptualization, and behavior in human beings who manifest a variety of other psychic and psychosomatic disturbances, for example, neurosis, obesity, alcoholism, hypochondriasis, paranoid tendencies, migraine, colitis, hyptertension and both male and female homosexuality. It has, as a matter of fact, been my experience to find depressive manifestations invariable and prominent in