Notes
1 See also Laplanche (Citation1989).
2 Essential depression is a term of art introduced and developed by Marty, M’Uzan and David (Citation1963) and the French Psychosomatic School. It relates to absence, blankness, voids and failures of representation, rather than the dynamics of melancholia and repressed aggression towards a lost object, as originally described by Freud (Citation1917) in Mourning and Melancholia. To this reviewer, it seems analogous to Kohut’s (Citation1977) description of “empty depression.”