Depression as a Psychoanalytic Problem

By (author) Paolo Azzone

Publication date:

07 December 2012

Length of book:

144 pages

Publisher

University Press of America

Dimensions:

235x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780761860419

Over the past few decades, psychoanalysis and dynamic psychiatry have been steadily stepping back from a key role in the understanding and treatment of depressive disorders. This book investigates the basis for such retreat by delving into the history of medicine, philosophy, religion, and literature. It unveils the social motives for the overwhelming consensus currently gathered by the biomedical model of depression. The book then moves on to discuss at depth psychoanalytic literature on depression and reveals how it possesses an enormous explanatory power for depression symptoms. This approach allows the author to offer readers a comprehensive, dynamically-oriented model of symptom formation in depression.

Prefatory Note
Acknowledgments
Part I: Historical Facts: Depression and Other Socially Shared Representations of Pain in Western Civilization
Chapter One: Sadness and Black Bile
Chapter Two: Sadness, Error and Sin
Chapter Three: Sadness and Human Societies
Part II: Clinical Facts
Chapter Four: Looking through a Distortive Mirror: Descriptive Psychopathology of Depression from a Psychoanalytic Perspective
Chapter Five: Encountering Depression in the Context of Mental Health Services: The Contribution from Psychoanalytic Literature
Part III: The Model
Chapter Six: A Model of the Process of Formation of Depressive Symptoms
Chapter Seven: Epistemological Observations
References

Azzone offers, in this compact book, a superb overview of the interpretation and treatment of depression. The book's strength resides in its historical and theoretical contextualization of depression, from the ancient to modern psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic approaches. The first part of the book comprises three chapters treating depression as a social and spiritual problem with serious implications for how clinicians should approach this mental illness. Special attention is paid to medieval understandings of depression. The second part takes up the clinical aspects of depression from the psychoanalytic perspective, and summarizes how psychoanalysis contributes to contemporary psychotherapeutic and psychodynamic approaches. The final part offers a model for comprehending the formation of depressive symptoms. Depression is conceptualized as above all a psychic problem. This book will be of immense value to clinicians and students of psychotherapy, especially those who practice from psychodynamic perspectives. The book fills a gap in the literature on depression such that to overlook Azzone's contribution is to risk ignoring the most significant rethinking of depression in the history of modern analysis. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections.