- Do you know how to say goodbye forever? Great stuff! “Of course, I don’t know how,” she grinned. - But I still have to try, right? Max Fry In this part of the article we will talk about how depression is related to childhood experiences and what personal history factors determine the risk of its occurrence in adulthood (you can read more about this here).3. Freud, who initiated the clinical analysis of this topic, considers depression to be a legacy of the primary “need for help” in the infant, completely powerless and unable to survive without the care of another. Accordingly, primary depressive feelings may already arise in infancy due to the absence of or separation from a nurturing object. In adulthood, depressive symptoms also signal that the person craves participation from the Other (analogous to the cry of a child craving help from his mother) . But the mother cannot always hear in time and is not always able to respond exactly as the child needs and at the very moment when he needs it. As adults, we may continue to experience this deficit on an unconscious level. And even in cases where a depressed person is deeply convinced that he does not need anyone, that he wants everyone to leave him alone, we must understand that deep down he hopes for an Almighty Other who will come to his aid. The process of growing up Every person is inevitably associated with experiencing a series of losses and disappointments. Of course, it is easier to go through them, feeling love from the parents and trust in them. But this is an ideal situation. In real life, feelings for parents are complex and ambivalent, and memories of childhood can also be very different. So, a “safety cushion” is not always formed in our psyche, which could work in a situation of collision with difficult events of external and internal reality. Therefore, we sometimes take for reality the illusion that we can somehow contrive and live without losses, that you can not choose from alternatives, but take “everything at once” (that is, having chosen one thing, not lose the other). But reality will still have its own way, and the worse we are at losing, grieving and letting go, the closer depression gets to us. In accordance with psychoanalytic theory, the earlier this or that critical frustration occurred, the higher the risk of developing emotional disorders in the future and the more severe the form they can manifest themselves. This pattern also extends to depressive spectrum disorders, in relation to which many analysts are of the opinion that early (pre-oedipal - that is, the first three years of life) emotional deficits, leading to the formation of so-called narcissistic lacunae (lack of “basic trust” in E. Erikson or “secure attachment” according to J. Bowlby). When a child, for various reasons, does not receive sufficient care and admiration from his parents, when they are perceived by the child as emotionally unavailable, he experiences a constant need for narcissistic input from the outside (including to make up for these parental deficits). American psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams suggests distinguishing two types of depressive personality, which develops under the influence of certain disturbances in early object relations: Any child has been in an existentially conditioned state of dependence on parents for a long time. If he feels that those on whom he depends are unreliable and cannot be trusted, he has no choice but to choose to accept this reality or deny it. If he accepts it, the result may be the conclusion that life is empty, meaningless , and he himself cannot influence anything, and therefore he lives with a chronic feeling of emptiness, melancholy, a sense of futility and existential despair. This version of depressive disorder is usually called anaclitic (translated from Greek “anaclitic”means “adjacent”, “adjacent”). It is characterized by a tendency towards symbiotic relationships, dependent personality tendencies, fear of rejection and the inability to rely on oneself. N. McWilliams describes another type of depressive personality type as follows: If he chooses to follow the path of denying that the people on whom he depends, unreliable (because otherwise he is doomed to live in perpetual fear), he may convince himself that the source of his unhappiness lies within himself. In this case, he will still have hope that if he constantly improves himself, the situation can change for the better. And here we are dealing with the introjective (literal translation from the Latin term “introjection” - “putting inside”) version of depressive disorder, which is characterized by an emphasis on self-criticism and guilt, as well as a painful focus on achievements. In both cases, we are talking about the emotional and/or physical deficiency of an adult at a time in the child’s life when he himself, due to age, is deprived adequate mental tools for processing the grief experienced due to feeling abandoned, abandoned. As a result, the child is forced to give up object-dependent behavior, despite the fact that dependence is still necessary and important for him. A similar idea is found in the work of American psychiatrist Silvano Arieti, who noted that a common feature of families of patients with depression is the assumption of emotional responsibility at too early an age, which is abandoned by adult family members. The atmosphere in such families is often imbued with excessive seriousness; there is a catastrophic lack of spontaneity and laughter; At the same time, there is a strong interdependence within the family, and the child is tacitly “appointed responsible” for the mental well-being of everyone else. Thus, continues Arieti, the child sees his task as brightening up the lives of his loved ones, and feels guilty, even a traitor, if he realizes his own desires and enjoys something that is not directly related to family values; he is focused on satisfying, “delighting” his parents, who are ready to “rich” him with crumbs of their love exclusively in moments of submission and obedience. English psychoanalyst Melanie Klein draws our attention to disturbances in the processes of projection-introjection during infancy and early childhood and their association with depressive disorders in adulthood. If the infant's first experience is strong frustration from the object (the mother), Klein notes, then his own innate aggression does not receive the processing necessary to introject a positive image of the parent, even in cases where later experiences turn out to be favorable .According to M. Klein, it is the primary experience that is fundamental: if initially a child has the opportunity to experience a significant Other as a good, that is, satisfying, accepting, accessible object, then he develops the ability for object constancy, and if later he is faced with separation /loss, he remains confident that the object will eventually return intact and safe. Accordingly, if the parent’s receiving (containing) function is insufficient, the child will associate any loss with his own aggressive impulses, feeling direct responsibility (and, therefore, guilt) for the end of the connection (that is, the end of a close relationship) with the object. In addition, repressed or dissociated aggression (to save a significant Other from its destructive force) inevitably “tightens” the Super-Ego, either in part of the Ego-ideal (narcissistic version of the compensatory idealization, in which the ideal becomes extremely detached from reality), or in terms of Conscience (a tendency to experience guilt and self-abasement). Another significant factor influencing a child’s predisposition to depression ishis mother has a depressive disorder. French psychoanalyst Andre Greene introduces the concept of “dead mother”, characterizing a physically present but emotionally absent depressed mother, who in the eyes of a child appears as an almost inanimate object, incapable of love and inaccessible to emotionally charged communication. As a result, the child introjects her as a “deadly object” harmful to his own development. A depressed mother makes it impossible for the child to separate normally when the time comes for this, and transmits to him, through projective identification, intense guilt. Because of this, the child has the feeling that he and no one else is to blame for his mother’s depression and her inability to love him. He may feel guilty even when he turns to her with trivial requests, to the point of believing that his very existence is a curse on his mother. Loss of a mother as a necessary stage of mental development One of the main ideas of psychoanalysis is that an important milestone in development of a person is his achievement of autonomy, that is, overcoming the initial symbiosis with his mother. This is exactly what the myth of Oedipus tells us (in Freud's understanding of this story). In normative development, exit from the Oedipal phase sanctions for the child disappointment and powerlessness in the face of inevitable loss, that is, the awareness that the desired object (mother) is no longer attainable. The French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva speaks more definitely and harshly on this topic: For men and women, the loss of a mother is a biological and mental necessity, the first milestone of autonomy. The murder of the mother is our vital need, a condition sine qua non (indispensable) of our individuation. The main thing is that it is carried out in an optimal way and can be subject to eroticization: either the lost object must be revealed as an erotic object (this is the case of male heterosexuality and female homosexuality), or the lost the object must be carried in an incredible symbolic effort, the undertaking of which can only be admired - an effort that eroticizes the other (the other sex in the case of a heterosexual woman) or transforms cultural constructions into a “sublimated” erotic object (here we can think of investments by men and women social connections, intellectual and aesthetic production, etc.). Italian analyst Stefano Andreoli, continuing the idea of ​​Y. Kristeva, notes that even in the most favorable cases (and even more so in less favorable ones), moving away from the mother and gaining autonomy leaves on an adult a wound that does not fully heal, a kind of “constant longing for a completely unattainable state.” He writes: This melancholy sounds in each of us as a kind of nostalgic melody, remaining outside the conscious memory, but finding a reliable refuge in the archaic preverbal unconscious. It is this melancholy, this melody that has fueled since ancient times the creations of artists and poets, in which they idealize the distant and the irretrievably gone past, romanticizing the pain of loss, or describing some kind of existential discomfort through concepts such as boredom (Ennui), the pain of life (Spleen - from the Greek splèn, i.e. spleen, the seat of black bile). It is no coincidence that Freud, precisely because of this tendency to continue to desire what he can never achieve, defined a person as “invalid from life.” In a sense, any psychopathology could be defined as an exacerbation of nostalgia for the original state of absolute peace that is available to a person only in the prenatal period, as well as in everything that is attached to it: omnipotence, immortality, perfection - that is, as a regressive escape from the reality of the present to the serenity of the distant (before birth) past. Psychotherapeutic experience shows that many of we are preferred to irrational suffering (“I’m depressed, I feel very bad, but no