Review of Complex depression: The role of personality dynamics and social ecology.

Reviews the book Complex Depression: The Role of Personality Dynamics and Social Ecology, by Golan Shahar (see record 2024-14831-000). My comments here are intended not as a critique of Shahar but to inform a psychoanalytic readership that may have lost awareness of how revolutionary Stern’s (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant was in reformulating psychoanalytic developmental psychology when that book was first published 40 years ago. The real issue, for purposes of this review, is how Shahar characterizes his reformulated depressive position because it differs in significant respects from Klein’s theory and is, I believe, a much more adequate empirical account of the psychodynamics involved. Shahar has given us a worthy contribution, one that I have discussed at considerable length, partly because I now know that he and I share much more than a Blattian intellectual lineage but mainly because of his thoroughgoing effort (a) to bring psychoanalytic ideas to nonpsychoanalytic clinicians in the treatment of depression and (b) to modify and psychodynamic thinking about depression in light of current research, often conducted by nonpsychoanalytic investigators, on this complex, challenging clinical problem.