The Policy of the Superego: Foundations of Structural and Dialectical Psychopathology – Luigi Anepeta
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
In the context of obsessive experiences, depression intervenes […] driven by a push for change that leads the subject to feel the need to address their unfulfilled needs. However, these needs have taken on an anarchic and transgressive drive and are intensely guilt-ridden.
[…]
In some cases, typically following manic excitement but also often as a result of attempts at radical life changes involving social detachment, which can occur during both hysterical and obsessive experiences, depression forces the subject to return to their pre-existing mortified, virtuous, scrupulous, and hyper-controlled way of life, along with the additional burden of real or imagined guilt.
[…]
This motivation, which involves the collusion of the ego with feelings of guilt, helps to understand the poor response to both pharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments.
The experience of deserving is always accompanied by the opposite feeling of suffering a terribly unfair punishment and, as a result, a visceral protest against God, chance, or destiny.
This protest, which is based on the observation that many other people are doing well without any merit, generates a knot of resentment and envy, as an expression of a visceral sense of justice, which almost always animates, at both the conscious and unconscious levels, fantasies of misfortune or feelings of relief in relation to others’ misfortunes.
The conflict underlying psychopathological discomfort is in fact always traceable to a functional disharmony, which at the extreme limit can lead to splitting, between the structural components of personality (the Superego and the antithetical Ego) that are defined based on the deployment of intrinsic needs, and which represent the substructures of the ego.