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The origins of my interest in depression lie in Freud's final conception of anxiety as a signal utilized by the ego. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (3), Freud wrote:
Anxiety is an affective state and as such can only … be felt by the ego … (p. 140). [It] should not be explained from an economic point of view, … is not newly created in repression; it is reproduced as an affective state … (p. 93). A danger situation is a recognized, remembered, expected situation of helplessness. Anxiety is the original reaction to helplessness in trauma and is reproduced later in the danger-situation as a signal for help. The ego, which experienced the trauma passively, now repeats it actively in a weakened version, in the hope of being able itself to direct its course (pp. 166-167).
The mastery of anxiety which reduces it to a signal of danger accompanies the unfolding of a genetic series of danger situations, each corresponding to an ego state of an increasing complexity of organization. In archaic or uncontrolled states of anxiety there has been a regressive revival of pre-existing structures; i.e., archaic ego states with their own danger situations as well as a limited repertoire of primitive defenses. The threat of helplessness and a revival of the traumatic situation is thus imminent.
It now seems like a simple, logical extension of this structural theory of anxiety to inquire whether depression, another basic affective state of the ego, cannot be similarly conceptualized. Yet it required the genius of Edward Bibring to make this step. In his fundamental paper, The Mechanism of Depression (1), he wrote: