A man with severe depression says he feels nothing when he sees his newborn grandchild, and concludes from this that he must be a fundamentally bad, unloving person. Before revealing the answer: how should this feeling and his interpretation of it be understood?

This is best understood as loss of emotional resonance, a recognised symptom most classically associated with depressive illness, rather than genuine evidence about his character. The book specifically notes that this symptom can compound feelings of guilt in a person with depressive illness, who may interpret their own lack of feeling as evidence of being a bad or unworthy person — which is exactly the conclusion he has drawn. Part of the clinical value of recognising this symptom explicitly is being able to reframe it for the patient: the absence of feeling is a symptom of his illness, not a true reflection of his underlying feelings or character, and this reframing can itself be therapeutically important.