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This work is a psychoanalytic symposium in Spanish on the subject of depression. Garma and Rascovsky have combed the literature and culled an excellent selection of articles on various aspects of the problem. The book opens with a resumé by Pichon-Rivière of the development of medical thinking about manic-depressive psychosis, from Hippocrates to Bleuler. This is followed by the papers on depression, which comprise the bulk of the book. There is a short section on mania and a final section devoted to Melanie Klein's ideas on manic-depressive states (1934).
The first dozen or more of the papers for the most part cover the development, in historical sequence, of analytic theories on the genetic structure of the manic-depressive psychosis. They include Abraham's paper on manic-depressive psychosis (1911), and on the oral phase of libido development (1916). From Freud's works the editors select a fragment of Totem and Taboo, dealing with the totem feast; short bits on narcissism and on the oral phase; an excerpt about identification from Group Psychology, and one on the superego from The Ego and the Id; a portion of Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety; and of course the classical Mourning and Melancholia. This group includes also a more recent contribution to the problem of infantile sexuality, by Editha Sterba (1942), which contains an excellent discussion of the oral phase of libido development.
The remainder of the papers are relatively more recent works, with a more clinical orientation. There are papers on depression by Rado, Helene Deutsch, and Gerö; a lucid discussion of suicide published originally in German by Garma in 1937; two contributions