The two dispositions most commonly confused with depressive psychology are narcissism (the depleted version) and masochism. 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 othe others. The tendency of therapists to misread a narcissistic or masochistic patient as depressiveseems to me attributable to two factors. First, depressively inclined therapists may project their owndynamics onto people whose core internal story is different. Second, people with either narcissisticor masochistic personality structure frequently have symptoms of clinical depression, especially dysthymic mood. Either misreading can have unfortunate clinical consequences.