Some Reflexions on Depressive Affect

In this paper I have tried to concentrate on the depressive affect as experienced, among others, in the psychoanalytic cure. Affects, which Freud considered of major importance (Freud, 1907) although he admitted we knew nothing of them (Freud, 1926), belong to the world of experience. They are apprehended by identifying with the Other and are understood once they are reinserted in the representational world and the 'discourse' of the analysand.

There is no doubt that depressive mood plays a considerable part among our affective states yet, paradoxically, its importance does not seem to have always been acknowledged. It appears to have been overshadowed by the importance justifiably given to anxiety, with the result that in the relationship anxiety–depression the first of the two has been emphasized to the detriment of the other. This position of neglect, of which Abraham (1911)1 already complained, is even more paradoxical in that Freud himself was depressive (Jones, 1953); (Schur, 1972); his self-analysis, triggered by his father's death (Anzieu, 1975), resulted in a process of mourning whose main contribution was the Traumdeutung(Freud, 1900). However, it was only gradually that he could understand the nature of the process. The death theme present in the psychoanalytic experience of the death wish ('Todeswunsch') and in several sporadic remarks (e.g. Freud, 1910) was reconsidered when he was faced with separation, death, war—loneliness after his students had left for the front (e.g. Freud, 1915), (1916). These works paved the way for the elaboration of a series of themes which resulted in 'Mourning and Melancholia' (Freud, 1917), written for the most part in 1915, but published only two years later. It was then that this theme emerges in Freud's correspondence with Karl Abraham who, in a way, took wilhelm Fliess's place—in Berlin !—and became the partner with whom he was to work on this subject.

However, it was soon clear that the main difficulty was not to