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How often have you, as a psychoanalytic clinician, had a conversation with a medication provider who proceeds to tell you that your severely depressed patient is suffering from chemical imbalance—a statement that is necessarily true insofar as all mental states are brain states and all brain states involve chemical processes but that is also trivial? Or, how often have you been told by a cognitive-behavioral colleague that your patient's chronic depression derives from dysfunctional or, worse yet, irrational beliefs? These questions are purely rhetorical, of course, a lead-in to the matter of Golan Shahar's new book, Complex Depression. In this relatively brief but insightful volume, a work of uncommon honesty because it begins its author's revelation that he lost to suicide the man who was his stepfather but who for all intents and purposes was his father, Shahar begins by explaining that clinical depression, not the mood state but the syndrome found in diagnostic manuals, is more likely to be complex, by which he means having recurrences, comorbidities, various interpersonal and social dysfunctions, and a high risk for suicide, than simple, meaning a single episode without comorbidity, significant interpersonal dysfunction, or significant suicidal risk. Noncomplex symptoms and course appear to account for less than 10% of depressions. Acknowledging briefly the necessary contribution of neurobiology to any depressive process and therefore affirming a biopsychosocial model, Shahar devotes the remainder of this work to an explication of the many factors that render depression far more likely to be complex than to be simple. Relying on Sidney Blatt's two-configurations model, Shahar argues that the major personality factor in complex depression is self-criticism, and he places this factor at the center of what he terms a reformulated depressive position (RDP), an organization of self-states that creates a vicious circle of self-criticism, depressed mood, interpersonal