This paper has two general sources: (1) ins own clinical psychoanalytic work extending over about four and one half decades; and (2) consideration of certain outstandingly influential ideas in our literature: first, those of the pioneer contributors, arid then those of certain more recent writers, whose views have sometimes exhibited important differences from those widley held in the post. I try to evaluate the two groups—in their occasional overlapping and important divergences, in relation to my own clinical experience. A certain general position of my own emerges from such process inevitably; but it is far from “revolutionary.” Indeed the contrary is more largely ture. In extreme anticipatory condensation—what I de propose, from my own reflections, is the preeminent importance of an archaic characterological core in depressive illness.
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