Please prepare a 10 minutes presentation describing a patient you worked with who suffered from depression.

Depression: An Analytical Approach

In view of the widespread use of antidepressant medication and time-limited cognitive-behavioural therapy as so-called treatments of choice for depression, many practising mental health professionals have lost sight of the landmark contribution of the early psychoanalysts who made great strides in the understanding of severe melancholia more than one hundred years ago. In this seminar we will first look at what we mean with depression as a clinical category of mental disorders, i.e. one of the many manifestations of psychopathology, and at what we mean with an analytical approach to depression.

I will provide an overview of some of the most seminal psychodynamic contributions to the study of depressive illness, beginning with the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, who, in his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia”, formulated a profound theory of the impact of loss and bereavement. We shall also consider the contributions of other major psychoanalytical thinkers including Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, and of course C.G Jung. Some clinical material will be used as case examples and for discussion.