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This paper surveys the development of views regarding the affective disorders and reports results of prefrontal leucotomy on eighty-two patients. Partridge's material and that available from the literature, both experimental and clinical, lead him to conclude that there are two types of affective disorders: 1, neurotic, functional or reactive in which the stimulus for the disease is some exogenous factor; 2, an endogenous type (manic-depressive) which has an 'enduring physical basis', and which is deduced to exist in the hypothalamus. Constitutional predisposition is posited. The frontal lobe cortex is understood as being primarily concerned with the conscious experience of emotion. Its stimuli arrive via the thalamus and hypothalamus. The argument for an 'enduring physical basis' in the endogenous type seems to be based on the assumption that the 'system', frontal cortex-thalamus-hypothalamus, is involved in all depressions. Leucotomy in the exogenous type permits the quickest recoveries while the endogenous type responds slowly with persistence of symptoms after the operation. The attitude of the patients who suffered from endogenous depression toward their illness was changed by the operation but the basic illness remained. In a single paragraph of this lengthy exposition, Partridge informs his readers about the psychoanalytic view concerning depression in which he demonstrates a fundamental misconception of psychoanalytic thinking as follows: 'The analytic school, also, would seem to regard all depressive states as reactive; and mainly to some form of loss, not merely in the material sense, but of something, whether a person, a cause or an idea, which had long been identified with the ego …'.