MEMORIA, TEMPORALITÀ E OBLIO NELLA PATOLOGIA DEPRESSIVA.

From a clinical and psychopathological point of view, depressive states are not only "mood disorders": many other psychic functions are altered, for instance ideation, basic cognitive functions such working memory, long-term narrative remembering and the forgetting function. The early description of depression in Western classical age was "Nostalgia," a medical category in which memory was in the forefront and that has had a long tradition in psychiatry until Karl Jasper's doctorate thesis. In early XX century, still, Tanzi thoroughly described the phenomenon of "painful hyper-remembering" in melancholic patients. Thereafter, both psychoanalysis and phenomenological psychopathology have stressed the role of the inability to forget painful events and either store them or recollect them abnormally. Past is ever present in melancholic patients' mind and this actualization negatively interferes with the ability to plan the future (so called "melancholic retrospection"). This mechanism is expressed by typical sentences such as "if this had never happened, now I would feel better..." and with retrospective emotions such as nostalgia (homesickness), regret, remorse, fault and even resentment and grievance (in mixed states). This inability to forget painful events is common with other disorders such as PTSD and Complex Mourning, where sometimes the course of time allows to dissociate the events from their painful burden. The altered function of forgetting is a transnosographic model that needs further neurobiological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]