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A discussion of the modern psychoanalytic concepts of the development of the libido and its relationship to the manic-depressive psychosis may perhaps best begin with a historical survey of the field. Leaving aside the prophetic flashes of insight that a careful exegesis of Freud's earlier writings would reveal, we may therefore start our review with Abraham's earliest articles on manic-depressive psychosis in 1911, Freud's analysis of Mourning and Melancholia in 1916, Abraham's brilliant reformulation of the fundamental issues in 1924, and the subsequent contributions by Rado, Helene Deutsch, Fenichel, and others.
Abraham's first article on the subject in 1911 is rather difficult reading for one accustomed to his later lucid style. One gets the impression during its perusal that Abraham, even yet partially bound by his early psychiatric training at , under Liepmann), and still a little dazzled by the brilliant light of the newer dynamic psychology, labors a bit in his efforts to fit specific intrapsychic mechanisms to a rigid Kraepelinian nosology. Thus, Abraham accepts almost without reservation the necessarily cyclical nature of “manic-depressive psychosis”, the psychodynamics of which he categorically differentiates from the more rapid oscillations of ambivalence in the obsessive-compulsive neuroses. Again, Abraham states in this early article that the rapport of the manic-depressive patient is “like that of a five-year-old”; I suppose he might later have amended: “like a five-year-old further regressed to the oral incorporative stage.” And yet, Abraham brilliantly applies to manic-depressive reactions a number of the more fundamental psychodynamic concepts that had been advanced by Freud during the preceding 10 years. Paraphrasing the Schreber case, Abraham states that the depressed patient feels universally hated because he himself feels incapable of