Temperament, personality and the vulnerability to mood disorders. The case of the melancholic type of personality (original) (raw)
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Phenomenology of depression: Contributions of Minkowski, Binswanger, Tellenbach and Tatossian
Estudos de Psicologia (Campinas), 2016
Eugène Minkowski, Ludwig Binswanger, Hubertus Tellenbach and Arthur Tatossian are key authors in phenomenological psychopathology. Through a theoretical review of the main works of these authors, we shall discuss their contributions to the understanding of the lived depressed. Following a phenomenological-structural method, Minkowski developed a descriptive phenomenology of depression, focusing on lived time. Binswanger, focusing on temporality, searches for the genesis of the lived depressed through the operating modes of retrospection and melancholic prospection. Tellenbach presents the typus melancholicus, a concept associated with the notion of endon. Tatossian discusses the possible conditions for the lived depressed through phenomenological categories of time, body, space and the relationship with each other, developing the notion of depressiveness. We may conclude that, although these authors have different contributions, their ideas are similar as they adopt a phenomenologic...
“From Melancholia to Depression. Ideas on a possible continuity”
In this paper, the history of melancholia and depression is addressed, with special emphasis on the issue of their continuity. Not surprisingly, opinions are divided on this matter. Proponents of what could be called the ‘unproblematic continuity view’ argue that what is now termed depressive disorder is more or less similar to melancholia. Proponents of the ‘discontinuity view’ firmly deny this. It is argued that, on a more fine- grained view, a modest continuity view is justified. In the first part of the paper, (1) an alternative interpretation of the unity of melancholia is provided that serves as a starting point for (2) a reconsideration of the relation between melancholia and depression. In the last part of the paper, (3) an attempt is made to shed light on differing etiological explanations of melancholia and to show how some of them have come to shape recent approaches to depression.
Philosophical anthropology and psychiatry: typus melancholicus as a human disposition
Seishin shinkeigaku zasshi = Psychiatria et neurologia Japonica, 2003
Key ideas of philosophical anthropology furnish the framework for a description of the personality type, typus melancholicus. These key ideas are: (1) all living beings are related to and interact with their environments, (2) all living beings must maintain their identities in distinction from their environments, (3) the biological constitution of human beings leaves them instinct-deficient, (4) the human-world relationship must therefore be partially determined by cultural shaping, and (5) social roles and norms determine the consciousness and behavior of human beings. "Dispositional vectors" are basic tendencies within human beings that move them toward particular forms of world-relatedness. These dispositional vectors are: over-identification with social norms (hypernomia), struggle with social norms (agonomia), under-identification with social norms (hyponomia), and over-identification with personal norms (idionomia). When the dispositional vector of hypernomia moves in a pathological direction, it becomes the personality type, typus melancholicus. The two fundamental features of typus melancholicus are hypernomia and intolerance of ambiguity.
Journal of Affective Disorders, 2006
Background: The melancholic type of personality (TM) has long been considered in continental and Japanese psychopathology as a relevant vulnerability trait constellation for the development of depression. Method: The symptom presentation in an outpatient population of 116 subjects suffering from a DSM-IV major depressive episode was rated according to the standardized documentation system of the Association for Methodology and Documentation in Psychiatry (AMDP). Personality features were explored by means of the Criteria for Typus Melancholicus (CTM). Results: Statistically significant differences in depression-related psychopathological scores (i.e. higher level of guilt feelings, feeling of the loss of feelings, loss of vital drive and lower degrees of irritability and dysphoria) were found between TM and non-TM subjects, supporting the phenomenic specificity of TM depression at both symptom and subsyndromal level. Limitation and conclusions: Although our results were obtained in a selected sample of outpatients at an University Mental Health Center, they are indicative of psychopathological differences between TM and NTM in the core symptoms of depression. These differences highlight the importance of including TM criteria for phenotypic characterization of depressive disorder, suggesting that it may improve diagnostic and therapeutic practice and might be a reasonable psychopathologic endophenotype in investigating affective-spectrum vulnerability in at-risk populations.
The transformation of intercorporeality in melancholia
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 215-234, 2013
In this article the author seeks to highlight a specific disorder related to bodily experience in melancholia conceived as a severe form of clinical depression. The article is divided into three parts. In the first section, the author investigates the intersubjective dimension of bodily experience in light of the categories of Außenand Innenleiblichkeit. In the second section, I explore a specific disturbance of the dimension of intercorporeality. The excessive feeling of the bodily (außenleibliche) visibility of his/her own sufferance is a fundamental aspect of depression. At a prereflexive level, we constantly assume the noncoincidence between one's own bodily expression and the Other's experience/reading of these expressions. An alteration of this (pre-reflexive) awareness occurs in melancholia. The patient feels as if the melancholic condition would be transparent to the other. In the third section, the author intends to show the alteration of the embodied communication between the melancholic person and the other investigating two particular phenomena: the exchange of gaze in a face to face encounter, and the disturbance of the oral sense, revealing a specific form of irresponsiveness and the experience of void.
The odd position of the melancholic - the loss of an explanatory model?
2007
Aristotle explained brilliance of mind and the exceptionality of great men in literature, politics, philosophy and the arts in terms of melancholy-melancholy being the temper of genius men, close to madness. The model of melancholy, which houses a perplexing multitude of phenomena and which is not very coherent as a whole, has served for centuries as a background and even as an explanatory model for creativity and its concomitant dark or painful elements. With the turn of the 19 th century and the rise of modern psychiatry, melancholy has been withdrawn from this broad cultural embeddedness, and has become a pathological syndrome in which the absence of creativity and the lack of directedness to the world are the main features. With Freud's intervention, in his essay 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1915), melancholia and clinical depression became intimately associated. At the same time, the model of melancholy lost its cultural significance as an explanatory frame in which creativity or artistic giftedness can be made explicit or intelligible. What does such a loss mean-and does it mean anything at all?-for the ways in which creativity and the gifted can be approached since the collapse of the older philosophical models of melancholy?
Jalubeanu D., Wolfe Ch., (Eds) Springer Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, 2020
In humoral pathology, melancholia (the Latin word for “melancholy” or “black bile”) refers to a dark and thick juice whose accumulation in the body was believed to cause the homonymous disease, and denoted by symptoms such as fear and deep sorrow. Since the time of Aristotle, melancholy has been associated with an inclination towards intellectual pursuits, spritual depth, and artistic creativity. In keeping with this trend and with Galen’s classification of temperaments, “melancholic” in the Middle Ages came to be identified as one the four fundamental temperaments (the others being phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric) describing the basic typology of all human characters. Although both the medical rationale and the symptoms linked to melancholy changed in the early modern period, melancholy remained central to medical and non-medical theorizations of sorrow/depression until the end of the eighteenth century, featuring as one of the most durable concepts in Western culture.
Depression and the melancholic temperament
European Journal of Personality, 1995
We examine how depression relates to two broad affective dispositions which we call ‘Negative Temperament’ and ‘Positive Temperament’. Depressed individuals characteristically display a particular combination of these traits (high Negative/low Positive Temperament), which also defines the traditional ‘melancholic’ type. Other evidence, however, suggests that this pattern is not unique to depression, but may also characterize other types of disorder: high Negative Temperament, in particular, appears to be nonsignificantly associated with distress‐based psychopathology. Finally, we review data indicating that the etiology of these relations is highly complex. Specifically, it appears that (i) temperament influences the development and course of depression; (ii) depressive episodes can lead to significant changes in temperament, some of which may be permanent; and (iii) temperament and depression may reflect, in part, a common genetic diathesis.
Exploring the margins of the bipolar spectrum: Temperamental features of the typus melancholicus
Journal of Affective Disorders, 2007
Background: Both the melancholic type of personality (TM) and the concept of temperament offer promising insights for the phenotypic characterization of mood-spectrum vulnerability. This research challenges the theoretical hiatus between the two psychopathological paradigmsthe phenomenological and the neo-Kraepelinianby means of an empirically-based approach. Method: Temperamental features were assessed through the Semi-structured Affective Temperament Interview (TEMPS-I) in an outpatient population of 116 clinically stable, euthymic subjects who suffered from a DSM IV major depressive disorder, previously enrolled for a study on the characteristics of major/unipolar depressive episode. The sample was subsequently evaluated and dichotomized according to the Criteria for Typus Melancholicus (CTM). Results: The TM subjects exhibited statistically significant differences in the temperamental profile as compared to non-TMs (NTM). A specific association between TM and hyperthymic temperament (HT) was confirmed by binary logistic regression analysis, suggesting that the phenomenological distinction TM vs. NTM is supported by different predisposing Kraepelinian "fundamental states". Limitation and conclusions: Although it is uncertain whether the findings would generalize outside the Italian culture, they nonetheless delineate a strong aggregation between TM and hyperthymic temperament, indicating that (1) an integrative neo-Kraepelinian/phenomenological cooperative model is warranted to tap the complexity of the phenotypic diathesis for mooddisorders, and (2) the hyperthymic-melancholic type of personality rests on the margins of the bipolar spectrum.
Depression’s Way of Expression in the Case of a Paranoid-Schizotypal Personality Structure
International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH, 2021
Motivation: A psychiatric patient should be looked at in the longitudinal dynamics of their life because it is possible that during youth, mental suffering has a certain tone to it, which is later erased, transformed or moved, through a greater or lesser contact with the ideas or the affect. Objective: We want to present the life history and dynamics of a subject whose first episode of mental illness of a depressive nature was around the age of 20, and to emphasize how over the years, this nature has faded. Currently, there is an absence of connection between the symptoms and the possible causalities. Material and methods: psychiatric and psychoanalytic interviews in dynamics, analysis of the life map, interpretations, the symptom’s evolution under medication, social support, identification of positive and negative prognostic factors, differential diagnoses, performing the diagnostic tree. Results: The patient presented a first depressive episode in youth with a trigger related to a...