The major themes of this book will be the psychopathology and psychotherapy of the individual patient—child, adolescent, and adult. When we go beyond the study of manifest symptomatology and make our first acquaintance with the history of the depressed patient, we feel as if an invisible force, running throughout his life, has brought him to his present predicament. One of the main aims of this book is to make visible that invisible force, by showing how it came into existence and sustained itself on many facts, internal and external, individual and sociocultural; most of them unconscious and others conscious, but with unconscious ramifications.