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Intimacy and communications on an equal basis with others are alien to the depressives because they fear that communicating as equals will lose them their dominant position, and that intimacy will expose their inadequacy of which they are convinced. They fear they would thus lose their significance and be reduced to nonentities.
As an introduction I want to give you two very pertinent quotations from Alfred Adler, written in 1914 and 1920. He wrote: “The discouraged child who finds that he can tyrannize best with tears will be a cry-baby; and a direct line of development leads from the cry-baby to the adult depressed.”1 “The patient tries to approximate the well-tested picture of a helpless, weak, needy child, for he discovered from personal experience that it possesses a great and compelling force.”2 And: “Tears and Complaints,—methods, which I have called ‘Water-power,’ can be an extremely effective weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing others to slavery.”3
When we examine the history of a depressed patient and his development, we will nearly always find that he did not recoil from stressing and even exaggerating his weakness, illness, and inadequacy. He has depended since childhood on the active help and assistance from others to an excessive degree. His crying, whining, pouting, his depressed mien, his presenting himself as weak, helpless, and sick, are all means for not only eliciting but even forcing services from others.