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SCHEFF'S argument (2001), whereby shame and the breakdown of social ties are causality implicated in depression, has potential to inform quantitative research on depression, particularly research focused on determinants of personality vulnerability. In the present article, I relate Scheff's argument to more than two and a half decades of theory and research on the interpersonal nature of depression, and on personality vulnerability to depression. The focus of this review is on the personality theories of Blatt (1974) and Beck (1983), in which an introjective/self-critical/ autonomous personality dimension and an anaclitic/dependent/sociotropic personality dimension are each conceptualized as a marker of vulnerability. Reviewing empirical research on these two dimensions, I then point out a certain puzzle emerging from previous findings: The introjective personality dimension appears to confer considerably more vulnerability than the anaclitic personality dimension. An attempt is made to reconcile this puzzle by drawing from Scheff's discussion of shame, as well as from psychosocial research on internal representations of self and others (Blatt, Auerbach, and Levy 1997), and from sociological work on the depressogenic conditions of modernity (Giddens 1991; Seligman 1990).
And, to top it all, he had a tic!
He was so scared ... For an analyst-intraining to have a psychosomatic symptom in front of a roomful of analysts was the ultimate in failure. And yet, somehow, the bathos of it helped him. What could he do? There was no hiding the true. So he said: "you may have noticed-I have a slight tic?" (Shem 1985, p. 380).
As argued by Dr. Scheff(2001), depression is inexorably linked with the breakdown of social bonds, and this breakdown can be precipitated by intense feelings of shame. Dr. Scheff should be applauded for his account, which uses qualitative research methods, of the alienation experienced by patients suffering from episodes of depression, as well as the hope that germinates within these patients when they are provided access to social ties. Scheff's article joins an increasing number of important qualitative accounts of depression (Jack 1998; Karp 1996), important not only because they communicate a first hand "voice of depression," but also because they connect depression research to the sociology of emotions (Retzinger 1991; Scheff 1990), thus highlighting the social nature of this phenomena.
Notwithstanding Scheff's portrayal of depression as...