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Although there have been several historical reviews of the concept of depression none has as yet been sufficiently comprehensive to place recent theoretical developments in their proper perspective. It is this gap that Mendelson proposes to fill in his study, which reviews developments in the concept of depression relating these to advances in psychoanalytic theory.
The opening chapter presents the history of the changing concepts of diagnosis and etiology in depression from pre-Kraepelinian days through the revisions of Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Meyer. A chronological account follows of the contributions to the concept of depression of Abraham, Freud, Rado, Gero, Klein, Bibring, Jacobson, Mabel Blake Cohen and her colleagues of the Washington group. Why roughly one quarter of this section—the bulk of the book—should be devoted to the work of Jacobson is not entirely clear.
To provide a comparative perspective, the fourth chapter undertakes to examine in cross-section the positions of the various contributors on such themes as psychological factors predisposing to depression and the question of whether there is a central anxiety situation in human development and how it is related to depression; it explores the role that obsessional elements, aggression, orality and integrative mechanisms play in depression. Commentaries on the work of Fairbairn, Balint, Spitz, and Benedek are also included in this highly informative chapter.
Problems of establishing common agreement as to the phenomenon of depression, its relation to schizoid and schizophrenic states and “depressive equivalents,” viewpoints on the treatability of depression and its special technical problems and to changes in theories of cure are briefly discussed, and the concluding chapter presents Dr. Mendelson's appraisal of the concept of depression as it has evolved and as it prevails today.
Psychoanalytic Concepts of Depression is indeed more complete in its coverage than earlier histories of the subject. However,