Conflictual relational demands of anaclitic and introjective depressive women

Abstract

The depression is associated with typical ways of relating to and handling conflict with others. This study empirically examined the most frequent relational demands of female depressive patients, depending on their personality configuration and the characteristics of relevant segments within the session: change and stuck episodes. Ten psychotherapies (n = 230 sessions) were observed in order to identify, delimit and code relevant episodes within session (24 change episodes and 26 stuck episodes) using the CCRT-LU-S Category System (Albani et al., 2002), to determine patients’ relational demands. The results showed that introjective patients verbalized more relational demands on themselves as a relational object, and therefore more demands with a subject-subject direction. These patients expressed their needs and wishes centered on questioning themselves, to the detriment of generating significant interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, it was possible to predict a greater presence of relational demands referred to contents about “loving” during the change episodes, confirming that the most frequent themes in patients’ discourse were a strong wish to feel happy, despite their experiences of helplessness. These findings highlight the need for a more dimensional view of depression that takes into account patients’ personality configurations and their association with little and big outcomes.