[Psychoanalytic aspects of depression, including mania].

The narcissistic emptiness respectively depletion in depression with the consecutive deficient narcissistic cathexis of ego, id, superego as well as of the body leads to the fact that the people concerned lose all the pleasureful freshness which healthy persons have, but are also unable to build up or to maintain a communicative object relation. On the one hand depressives have the desire to incorporate and to possess in a compensatory-fusionary way objects and on the other hand, since the objects lose by this their object character, they fear them at the same time. Partners of depressives experience themselves often as being totally in their hands respectively "devoured" by them. How so ever the fusion of the depressives might be, they always suffer from the impression having lost their self as well as the objects. Submitted to their narcissistically uncathected archaic superego, depressives are strictly directed towards law and order. An individual who is not able to accept himself in such a way, has also no possibility for an object love since the basis of each object relation is always the enlargement of the self onto the object and only on this basis an identification can be realized. Due to a narcissistically insufficient cathexis of the body respectively of certain body functions, pains are often experienced, whereby it may happen that the pain experience represents the depression itself. Due to this narcissistic deficiency the depressive considers himself to be outside any social relationships. The depressive suffers therefore not only from the lost self but also from the object from which he feels estranged. In mania however the people concerned succeed to have the enthralling experience of a compensatory grandioe self and of the fusion with the object. Why this defense against the narcissistic emptiness respectively depletion is possible, even when admitting a genetic predisposition, must still be clarified.