Download Author: Arieti, Silvano, M.D.

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The Manifest Symptomatology of Depression in Adults

A depression is called primary when it constitutes an essential component of a syndrome. An endogenous depression is based on organic factors. A reactive depression is precipitated by an event perceived by the patient as harmful. The differentiation between psychotic depression and depressive neurosis depends on wether the reaction affects the reality testing enough to be considered a psychosis.

The Psychobiology of Sadness

  • Introductory Remarks
  • Sadness
  • Other Aspects of Sadness
  • Transformation of Sadness
  • Unresolved Sadness and Depression

Psychodynamics of Severe Depression

In practice we find that many states of sadness leading to severe depression have a long course, either chronic or subchronic, liminal or subliminal. We also find that in many cases in which a specific occurrence was the obvious and major precipitating factor, a subliminal state of sadness resulting from previous contingencies preexisted. Thus it is important to study the longitudinal psychodynamic history of each patient.

Psychotherapy of Severe Depression

For major therapeutic approaches are available for the treatment of severe depression: psychotherapy, drug therapy, shock therapy, and hospitalization milieu therapy. Indications for psychotherapy exist in every case of primary severe depression. The intensity should not deter the therapist from making psychotherapeutic attempts. Concomitant drug therapy does not make the patient less accessible to psychotherapy.

  • Choice of Treatment
  • Beginning of Psychotherapy
  • Therapy of the Patient with a Pattern of Submission to the Dominant Other
  • The Treatment of Claiming Depression
  • Treatment of Depression Following Failure to Reach the Dominant Goal, and of Depression with Mixed Patterns
  • Advanced Stage of Treatment

Postpartum Depression

The more we study each case psychodynamically, the more we realize that the experience of giving birth to a child was an episode of such magnitude as to require a complete psychological readjustment on the part of the patient.

  • Introductory Remarks
  • Psychodynamic Developments
  • Case Report

Psychotherapy of Depression During the Middle Years

What sooner or later emerges is the symbolic importance of having reached the middle years, the menopause, or the climacterium. A recurring theme is that life has come, or is about to come, to an end.

  • Specific Psychodynamics in the Middle Years
  • Psychotherapy
  • Case Reports

Sociocultural Factors, Sociology of Knowledge, and Depression

  • Introduction
  • Greater Incidence of Depression in Women
  • Affective Psychoses and Inner-Directed or Other-Directed Society
  • Literature and Depression: Tragedy
  • Our Era As the Age of Depression
  • Socio-Philosophical Premises of the Psychotherapist of Depressed Patients

Interpretation of Schizophrenia

This work has been hailed by reviewers as a “work of great importance”, a “monumental work that will have profound and lingering influence on all students concerned with an understanding of schizophrenia” and “the most comprehensive presentation of the subject since that of Bleuler in 1911.” Some of the outstanding sections are: the psychodynamic mechanisms of childhood and adolescence, the structural analysis of schizophrenic thought and language, and the development of the catatonic process. (1373 pp.)

Reviews:

“I am overwhelmed with the completeness of this volume of Arieti’s. I suppose there is no one who knows more about this subject than does he. If there is someone, I don’t know him. This major work of Arieti’s, thirty-three years in the making, gives enlightened evidence of our vastly increased knowledge of schizophrenia. It breathes a sense of optimism and states that present-day understanding is sufficient to permit a totally successful treatment of many patients and a marked amelioration of others. This is the work of a master craftsman. It is a ‘must.'”
—Frances J Braceland M.D., Editor American Journal of Psychiatry

“A monumental and definitive study of what is known and conjectured about schizophrenia—remarkable both for its scientific content and profound humanism. No one who reads Dr. Arieti’s book will go away unmoved. The human mind is a strange and mysterious continent and Dr. Arieti has illuminated some of its darkest parts.”
—1975 National Book Award for Science

“I find the book exceedingly valuable. It is characterized by astute clinical observation and rich experience in devoted work. It is highly informative, stimulating, and useful in clinical practice. It also points the way toward future studies and ways to deepen our understanding of schizophrenia in the future. All of us who care about the welfare of schizophrenic patients are in Arieti’s debt.
—David Hamburg M.D., Reed-Hodgson Professor of Human Biology
Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University

“Every serious student of the schizophrenic processes will wish to read Dr. Silvano Arieti’s Interpretation of Schizophrenia. It brings forward Dr. Arieti’s own accumulated experiences in working with the schizophrenic over the past years, his recording of new knowledge derived from the work of others, its weighing and assessment against those hypotheses formulated by himself. The author’s knowledge of the schizophrenic shines through. He is one of the few to concern himself with the formal aspects of schizophrenic though. In this edition he discusses teleologic regression, pathological though, and, as he sees it, the transference of ordinarily held abstract ideation into concrete representations. His chapter on the now rare catatonics is outstanding, presenting as it does … extraordinarily interesting case reports. For those most concerned with treatment, his discussions and recommendations as to psychotherapy will be found refreshing. There is little left out in this monumental work.
—Lawrence Kolb M.D. Director, Department of Mental Hygiene
New York State Psychiatric Institution