Psychosomatic Medicine. XIII, 1951: Psychodynamics of Depression from the Etiologic Point of View. Sandor Rado. Pp. 51–55.

Depression is a process of miscarried repair. It is a desperate cry for love, precipitated by an actual or imagined loss. It is patterned on the hungry infant's cry for help. The emotional overreaction to this emergency unfolds unconsciously as an expiatory process of self-punishment. By blaming and punishing himself for the loss he has suffered, the patient wishes to reconcile the mother. However, a coercive rage is also set in operation: the patient would coerce his object to love him. He has the same idea as had the infant: to destroy the frustrating aspect of the mother while retaining the gratifying aspect. When the patient feels that his coercive rage is defeated, repentance gains the upper hand and self-punishment is augmented by a retroflexive recoil of the rage. As a superlative bid for forgiveness, the patient may be driven to suicide. Thus, the patient strives to regain the mother's love by the simultaneous use of two antagonistic forces. In the depressive period the struggle ends in the triumph of submissive fear over coercive rage. Similar grave conflicts between excessive emergency emotions are also a primary constituent in obsessional and paranoid patterns, although the relative strength of the contending forces is different, as are their disordering effects. In the psychodynamics of all disordered behavior, the patient's emotional overreactions to danger in terms of pain, fear and rage are of surpassing importance. An investigation of this problem must include the physiologic and genetic aspects. To make fruitful collaboration with related scientific fields possible, obsolete methods and concepts in psychoanalysis must be abandoned and interpretation of the patient's behavior must be expressed in terms of adaptational psychodynamics. A sound, consistent and verifiable conceptual scheme must be evolved to keep pace with the general advance of science.