Depression on a Screen. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the Light of Cognitive Theories of Depression

This article analyses “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the light of the American psychiatrist A. T. Beck’s diagnostic criteria and cognitive theories for interpreting and evaluating symptoms and levels of depression. This study aims to show that many symptoms listed in Beck’s Inventory for Measuring Depression (sixteen out of twenty-one) are recognizable – at different levels of signifier and signified – in both the poetical structure and the imagery of the poem, whereas specific aspects included in Cognitive Therapy of Depression (for instance, the cognitive process defined by Beck as “Faulty Information Processing” and two crucial points of this process, “Selective abstraction” and “Arbitrary inference”) are identifiable in some of the most relevant figurative isotopies of the poem.