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It is quite an event when a book written by a Scandinavian psychologist is published in English and moreover with acclaim from renowned people like Anne-Marie Sandler, Colin M. Parkes and John Bowlby. One opens the book with great expectations, which are, however, only partially fulfilled.
Emmy Gut's central thesis states that becoming depressed forms universal genetic equipment for coping with specific problems. She introduces “normal depression” as different from all other painful affects. Whenever we perceive, largely unconsciously, that a significant effort of ours is failing in its purpose, and cannot grasp what is amiss, we react with a “basic depressed response”. This basic depressed response can be productive or unproductive. In productive depression, some useful learning or maturation will occur as the result of the work of depression. If, however, the basic depressed response is inhibited by other factors, the whole process will be terminated and a more-or-less chronic, severe condition will ensue. This fundamental reaction will sometimes only deteriorate, and at other times become a “normal depressed mood”.
The description of the depressed reaction illustrates the well-known criteria of clinical depression, e.g., depressed mood, lack of initiative, slowing down of thought and actions, disturbed sleep, disturbances of recall and concentration, feelings of tiredness and lack of energy. Emmy Gut emphasises that endogenous depressions are included in her definition of basic depressed response.
The work of depression comprises largely unconscious processes of information. For instance, “while we are lying awake during the quiet hours of the night, trains of thought may, at last, yield a conscious experience of grief, anxiety, or anger and its causes, or allow some significant recollection or some ignored perception to come into focus”, and, “it can lead to our discovering new means of carrying out our intentions, or to the recognition that we should aban