Depressive Affect

Depressive affect is a conscious, preconscious, or unconscious affect in which the subject feels helpless and hopeless about attaining certain aims. There is a broad continuum of depressive affect ranging from signal depressive affect to uncontrolled affect as in psychotic depressive illness. There are two primary affects of unpleasure—primary anxiety affect and primary depressive affect. This paper postulates a class of painful affects characterized by a content of helplessness which are developmental derivatives of primary depressive affect. They include: helplessness, depressive affect, guilt, shame, sadness, grief. These affects reflect a discrepancy between an actual state of the self and a wished-for state of well-being. The derivatives of primary depressive reaction are reactions to an actual or expected traumatic situation, whereas anxiety affects are reactions to an actual or expected danger situation.

The development of depressive affect follows a relatively separate pathway from that of anxiety affect. Both depressive and anxiety affects develop from basic psychobiological adaptive functions of humans and other animals. The inhibition function of depressive affect is an adaptive preconscious automatism wherein signal depressive affect communicates the need to stop actions directed at unobtainable aims. Depressive equivalents and masked depressive reactions arise from the subject's need to defend against the awareness of depressive affect. Freud's concept of the central role of anxiety in defensive operations is revised by the accumulation of clinical data showing that any unpleasurable affect can initiate defensive activity and symptom formation.