“Anxiety” & “(Bipolar) Depression”

Anxiety and depression are often treated by contemporary psychiatry as if they were one and the same, yet in psychoanalysis they are understood as serving starkly different psychic functions.  On the other hand, Freud objected to the popular distinction between bipolar depression and ordinary melancholia.  A psychoanalytic approach to both bipolar and so-called unipolar depression would then begin with discerning the dynamics of a person’s moods—that is, what the signifiers and identifications are that drive their movement between morbid catatonia and more lively states of attention.