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This is a detailed summary of the psychoanalytic literature on depression and the depressive affect. The review ranges over childhood developmental studies, discussions of helplessness, loss, grief, boredom, and the function of mourning in the analytic process and in creativity. Haynal attempts to integrate the various viewpoints; the schools of psychoanalytic thought are only apparently divergent concerning depression. Their different languages stem not so much from different viewpoints but from the complexity of dynamic, economic, and topographical (structural) factors involved in the depressive affect. Haynal focuses on depressive affect as experienced in, among other places, the course of psychoanalytic treatment. Abraham had already complained of the role assigned to the depressive affect as a poor relation taking second place to anxiety. This role was assigned from the beginning by Freud, himself a depressive whose self-analysis was initiated in the course of mourning for his father. Depression seemed to be studied more by the Kleinian school or by others on the margin of or clearly outside the Freudian group. Nonetheless, many analysts, especially the Budapest group (Bak, Balint, Benedek, Gero, Harnik, Rado) became interested in the relation to the primary object and touched on the theme of depression more fully. For Haynal, the capital moment in the evolution of the human being is the universal experience of the progressive loss of the mother. From this experience the depressive affect develops. It is thus concomitant with the loss of omnipotence and fusion during separation-individuation. Depression occurs at the moment of passing from a narcissistic to an object-related organization. This passage involves an all-important experience of helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) and the abandonment of feelings of omnipotence. Out of the loss comes the desire to substitute something for what was lost. This principle of functioning of the psychic apparatus i