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The editors had two aims in developing the book: first, “to build bridges between neighboring disciplines…demonstrating that areas such as the biological and the psychological are not cut off from each other” in providing further understanding of depression and how to treat it and, second, to test the hypothesis “that depression could be regarded as a manifestation of existential factors in human life.” A book with these aims is “very much in keeping with the current trend in psychiatry, which is struggling toward a socio-psychobiological model” (p. xi). The articles assembled by Anthony and Benedek contain much of what is presently known or thought that would enable the development of such a model: there are sections on the biological and social substrate of depression, on the genesis of psychoanalytic concepts relating to depression; on depression during the life cycle; and on treatment modalities. In addition to the editors themselves, contributors include Mortimer Ostow, Edith Jacobson, Roy S. Grinker, Sr., George H. Pollock, Arnold I. Goldberg, and a number of others. An article by Michael Franz Basch presents a revision of existing causal hypotheses of depression.
The book contains a formidable array of findings and summaries of research in biochemical and neuropharmacological study of the affective disorders, anhedonia and depression in schizophrenia, and other articles, each of which merits intensive study.