The attachment theory can teach us many things about depression.  John Bowlby (1969) saw child’s attachment towards his mother as necessary for survival.

          When the parent child bond has an unstable evolution, children see themselves as people unworthy to be loved, and their consider their mother to be an abandoned person that they cannot get attached to. These children become depressed as adults, every time they go through a loss, because loss brings back the feeling of abandonment and the feeling of not being loved.

          Almost all psychoanalytical views suggest that depressive patients have fundamental narcissist vulnerability or fragile self-esteem.(Busch 2004).

          Fury and aggressivity also play a part in most theories, especially in association with the guilt and self denigration that these attitudes produce. Also, we can add the search for a high protective figure, with the certainty that the patient will never find it.

          The contemporary psychodynamic model needs to identify the children’s early traumatic experiences in order to prevent ulterior disharmonic developments. Losing a parent or early parent separation triggers the abandonment feeling that prevents the fulfillment of the needs that a parent usually takes care of. As the child grows, he becomes introverted and develops a feeling of sorrow and loss, which is reactivated when loss appears in the adult life. If the loss appears in adult life, its harmful effects are more prominent, because the child’s self-esteem is generally based on the first interactions with his family. This is a vulnerable self-esteem, with origins in a childhood trauma.

          In adult life, social difficulties might appear as a result of the child growing and developing his personality in the context of problematic relationships with parents and other significant persons. Therefore, adults with such a past might have difficulties in forming and maintaining relationships, and are more vulnerable to loss and to be hurt by other’s behavior. Defensive mechanisms occur early in life in order to control painful emotional states. Exaggerated and persistent self critique is an immature type of defense and it can have a negative effect in the emotional state’s development.

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