Sigmund Freud's Psychodynamic View Of Depression

A friend of mine is a single mother of two young children who has struggled financially for several years after her boyfriend and she broke up. The father of her children is not involved anymore by choice and does not support any of them nor help with any kind of child support. She works full time and does her best to support her children. Even though she does not enjoy her job and the pay isn’t the best she has not found something else that works well with her schedule. She was struggling with feelings of hopelessness, sadness, fatigue and appetite loss so she decided to meet with a psychiatrist and was later diagnosed with depression. Comer 2014, describes “depression as a low, sad state in which life seems dark and its challenges overwhelming” (171).
In the psychodynamic view Freud believed that depression could be linked to loss or rejection of a parent in where an individual would regress to the oral stage of development and direct their feelings of sadness and anger toward themselves. Freud also explained both symbolic and imagined loss, where you associate other events with the loss of a loved one. According to Comer 2014, “object relations theorists, the psychodynamic theorists who emphasize relationships, propose that depression results when people’s relationships leave them …show more content…
The genetic factors suggest that some people can inherit a predisposition to depression and studies have found that depression can be tied to certain genes on chromosomes. Biochemical factors include both norepinephrine and serotonin which have been strongly linked to depression. In the biological view theorists would most likely look at my friends’ health and family history to find connections to her diagnosed depression. If it was revealed that her grandmother also suffered from depression it would give a possible connection to why she is experiencing