Depression as a Psychoanalytic Problem

Paolo Azzone

dic 2012 · University Press of America

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Over the past few decades, psychoanalysis and dynamic psychiatry have been steadily stepping back from a key role in the understanding and treatment of depressive disorders. This book investigates the basis for such retreat by delving into the history of medicine, philosophy, religion, and literature. It unveils the social motives for the overwhelming consensus currently gathered by the biomedical model of depression. The book then moves on to discuss at depth psychoanalytic literature on depression and reveals how it possesses an enormous explanatory power for depression symptoms. This approach allows the author to offer readers a comprehensive, dynamically-oriented model of symptom formation in depression.

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Paolo Azzone is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. He works at the G. Salvini Hospital in Milan, Italy. Azzone substantially contributed to the establishment of a psychotherapy research tradition in Italy, with empirical studies on the psychotherapy process and on dreams. His current interests include psychoanalytic treatment of depression and the intersections between psychoanalysis and philosophy, history, and religious experience. He is co-editor of La mente dell’anima (The Mind of Soul), 2008.