Various psychoanalytic studies of depression, including those of Freud, Abraham, Spitz, Bibring, and Joffe and Sandler are reviewed. An attempt is made to integrate what may seem to be separate lines of investigation and to clarify a confusion between the descriptive and the dynamic points of view about depression. The author describes a complex interaction among somatic factors, the development of paralyzing depressive affect, the attempt to avoid psychic pain, dealing with narcissistic injury, and the institution of psychological compensatory events. Rechardt postulates a continuum of clinical conditions in which one or another of these factors predominates. The continuum ranges from one pole, at which narcissistic disturbances and efforts to regulate them are in the foreground, through a middle group characterized by the development of depressive affect, to an opposite pole at which hypomania, mania, and other psychological compensatory events are most in evidence.