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Debray discusses what is sometimes called "essential depression," in which there is a lack of object relatedness and of goals, but no particular complaints except perhaps of a lowering of the tonus of life, as well as a tendency to engage merely mechanically in repetitive activities. Something seems extinguished on the mental scene in these patients, and they seem held in suspense prior to their eventual somatic disorganization. Something is lacking, something that might give color and life to them. Pierre Marty, an eminent theorist on psychosomatic illness, has ascribed this type of depression to a poorly functioning preconscious. His theory is consistent with Freud's view of the preconscious as an intermediary, regulative system between consciousness and the unconscious. The preconscious in this theory is characterized by its "thickness," its internal dynamics, and the permanence of its functioning. It is at times when the functioning is diminished that essential depression with its psychosomatic phenomena appear. Debray focuses on patients with serious and chronic somatic illness, such as insulin-dependent diabetics. In many of these patients a great part of their psychic energy, and thus vital energy, is in a sense fixated on the level of the reality of their irreversible somatic condition and its inevitable evolution. This makes them very difficult in treatment, because the margin for maneuvering therapeutically is very small. Debray discusses cases of a patient with a rheumatic ailment, and of infants with precocious psychosomatic ailments, as illustrative of this view of the regulatory function of the preconscious.