[Psychological theories on the vulnerability to depression]

The problem of psychological vulnerability refers back to the dysymetric interactions between biological, life-event and personality factors. The term "personality" must be defined in terms of three factors: differential characteristics of the primary traits, "temperament" from the purely biological stand-point, and psychodynamic organization. The following discussion will deal solely with notions of temperament and psychodynamic organization. The renewed interest in the notion of temperament for the constitution of depression has been evoked in a number of recent studies, and allows an integrative approach of the biological phenomena. From the stand-point of psychodynamic organization, we should be less concerned with a strictly etiological role than with the mechanisms involved: loss of the object, in the neurotic model (depressive neurosis?) absence of the object (severe narcissistic disorders). This psychodynamic clinical approach must also take into account the triggering or unmasking effects of the depressive state itself on the underlying personality structure.