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Depression, even in the earliest psychoanalytic investigations, has always been related to disturbed object relations. Despite this, the main focus was on intrapsychic factors and not on interpersonal process. In Freud's later writings, however, he recognized that groups could determine individual functioning by exerting regressive and deindividuating forces.* This paper will discuss certain forms of family group structure that tend to prevent individuation and separation, continue to be regressive, and contribute to the development of depressive phenomena. The underlying conceptual framework employed is an extension of the previous work reported on the symbiotic survival pattern of interaction found in families with a schizophrenic member (Slipp 1969, 1972, 1973). A psychoanalytic theory of depression is proposed which includes both the intrapsychic and interpersonal levels.
The first psychoanalytic theory differentiating depression from normal mourning was developed by Abraham (1911). In depression, unconscious hostility existed toward a lost love object. In