Related Experiment Videos
[Psychoanalytic aspects of depression, including mania]
Zeitschrift Fur Psychosomatische Medizin Und Psychoanalyse
|January 1, 1987
Summary
Individuals with depression experience narcissistic depletion, losing pleasure and object relations. Mania offers a compensatory grandiose self and fusion, but the defense against emptiness requires further study.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Psychiatry
- Psychoanalysis
Background:
- Narcissistic emptiness and depletion are central to depressive states.
- This deficiency impacts the ego, id, superego, and body, leading to loss of vitality.
- It hinders the ability to form and maintain healthy object relations.
Observation:
- Depressives exhibit compensatory-fusionary desires for objects, yet fear losing their objecthood.
- Partners may feel consumed or controlled by individuals experiencing depression.
- Despite fusion attempts, depressives often feel a loss of self and objects.
Findings:
- A harsh, narcissistically uncathected superego enforces strict adherence to rules.
- Inability to self-accept precludes object love, as self-enlargement onto the object is foundational for identification.
- Narcissistic deficits can manifest as physical pain, sometimes representing the depression itself.
Implications:
- Depression involves a profound sense of social estrangement due to narcissistic deficiency.
- Individuals suffer from a lost self and alienation from objects.
- Mania presents a defense mechanism with a grandiose self and object fusion, the origins of which warrant further investigation.