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We all observe and we all experience the phenomenon known as depression. It occurs to some more than to others, but it occurs to all of us. Because depression is a ubiquitous affect, I think that such associations to it as “depressive personality” and “oral fixation” are assumptions and oversimplifications. Not all people who become depressed have the same personality, and they are not all orally fixated. I am concerned that too many depressed patients are treated according to diagnostic label, stereotype, assumption, and theoretical prejudice. I think we can do better.
There is another assumption (based on a misunderstanding of what Freud said) that is harmful to objective thinking; that depression is always “hostility reflected against the self.” In his introductory comments to Mourning and Melancholia in 1917, Freud clearly stated that melancholia (depression) is not a single clinical entity, and that his essay pertained only to observations on a small group of depressed patients he had treated. He formulated that these patients felt hate toward an introjected love object. He stressed that these observations and formulations were not meant to apply generally to all depressions. Unfortunately, Freud's formulation of the psychodynamics of a circumscribed group of patients has too often evolved into a generalized distortion of theory, and into a myth that depression is always hate turned against the self.
Certainly there are thoughtful exceptions to this myth in the literature on depression, but not enough, it seems, to have dispelled it. In viewing the phenomenon of depression scientifically, Bibring (1953) made a heroic contribution to the liberation of