The two dispositions most commonly confused with depressive psychology are narcissism (the depleted version)psychology and masochism psychology. It is my impression that misdiagnoses are more often made in the direction of construing as depressive someone who is more basically either narcissistic or masochistic than in the direction of misunderstanding an essentially depressive person as either of the others. The tendency of therapists to misread a narcissistic or masochistic patient as depressive seems to me attributable to two factors. First, depressively inclined therapists may project their own dynamics onto people whose core internal story is different. Second, people with either narcissistic or masochistic personality structure frequently have symptoms of clinical depression, especially dysthymic mood. Either misreading can have unfortunate clinical consequences.