Discussion of Bernhard Berliner's Article, Psychodynamics of the Depressive Character

Dr. Berliner's provocative paper stimulated reflection on at least two relevant issues: first, the matter of nosology, and second, the question of the relation between interpersonal and intrapsychic factors in development and pathogenesis.

Psychoanalysis has inherited from predynamic psychiatry descriptive diagnostic categories which do not really lend themselves to satisfactory translation into the psychoanalytic frame of reference. The traditional terms provide us only with relatively gross and approximate abbreviations rather than with precise meaningful illuminations of complex psychopathology. Dr. Berliner has performed a most useful service in calling our attention to the need for clarification and more exact definition of two widely applied diagnoses: “moral masochist” and “depressive character.” However, it is just because we do not yet have a systematic analytic nosology that it is difficult to arrive at a dependable judgment of his thesis, namely, that these terms are essentially identical and that “the term masochism should apply only to the special character of object relations … to which the depressive character is prone.”

Masochistic behavior can be observed in persons who have been assigned a wide variety of the usual diagnostic categories, and our clinical experience does not, in fact, lead us to conclude that a depressive substate is an invariably necessary and sufficient factor for all of them. I agree that depression may frequently be important in the genesis of masochistic behavior, but for the present I hesitate to restrict the use of the term to the object relations of the depressive. Dr. Berliner's problem, and ours, resides in the difficulty of achieving an exact dynamic vocabulary for the differentiation of pathology while utilizing rather crude and static, albeit “classical,” labels.

The author's reappraisal of the Oedipus myth and the oedipal situation in personal development is particularly interesting. His thesis is that we must understand