Philosophical anthropology and psychiatry: typus melancholicus as a human disposition (original) (raw)
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Freudian psychoanalysis and sociobiology: A synthesis
American Psychologist, 1982
The descriptions of human behavior offered by Freudian psychoanalysis correspond remarkably well with the predictions generated by the sociobiological application of modern evolutionary theory. The two paradigms are most parallel respecting the descriptions of behavior they deduce, while some important divergences occur regarding the hypothesized mediating mechanisms. Sociobiological treatment of Freudian constructs results in a view of the origins and worth of these descriptive notions based on currently acceptable scientific theory and empirical fact. There can be little doubt that Freudian psychoanalysis is the "first force" in 20th-century psychology. Psychoanalysis as a personality theory is the most comprehensive one available, detailing the structure, dynamics, and development of personality to a degree unsurpassed by its competitors. However, complexity and breadth do not insure universal acceptance, and psychoanalysis has had its fervid critics since the early stages of the movement. Criticisms have focused primarily on mentalistic constructs such as the id, unconscious, and oedipus complex. One particular source of annoyance to environmentally oriented psye-hologists has been Freud's critical emphasis on biological determinism, or at least his insistence that psychic determinism is rooted in the biology of the organism. It is well known that Freud was a research physician and scientist who believed that his constructs, such as id, ego, and superego, would eventually be discovered to have physiological and perhaps even evolutionary origins (cf. Sulloway, 1979). This paper argues that Freud's theory of personality is highly compatible with certain emerging views about the evolutionary bases of human behavior. Sociobiologists (e.g., Barash, 1979) in particular have integrated recent findings from ethology, ecology, and genetics to develop a theory of human social behavior. Their central thesis is that human social behavior and organization rep
Official Journal of the Italian Society of Psychopathology, 2014
The concept of Typus Melancholicus (TM) was shaped by Tellenbach to describe the premorbid and intermorbid personality vulnerable to endogenous depression. The first part of this paper aims the description of the premorbid features of TM personality-orderliness, conscientiousness, hyper/hetereonomia and intolerance of ambiguity. After, we present the life world of the TM, i.e. a qualitative descriptions of the lived experiences about the body, self, time, space, and others. Also, we describe the basic principles of Tellenbach's theory-the method, the concept of endon, rhythmic and situation sensu Tellenbach as a special way of the person of living the relationship with the world per se in an endless reciprocal exchange. Starting from a clinical case, we show the theoretical evolutions of TM concept and underline the typical way which links the premorbid condition to melancholia. Finally, we ask if the TM concept can be still considered a valid construct in today's society, helpful in understanding and explaining identity crisis leading to depressive decompositions.
The Concept of Pathology and Psychiatry's Need for a Philosophy of Life
In Phenomenology 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester Embree, Michael Barber, and Thomas J. Nenon, pps 311-323, 2010
Stipulating that human being-in-the-world lies at the basis of phenomenological psychiatry, we move from the phenomenological notion of the correlation of experiencing subject with his or her experienced world to the level of the organism-environment relationship. Fundamental agreements between Hans Jonas's and George Canguilhem's philosophical biologies are shown. These agreements lie in elaborations of the "dynamic polarities" that relate the organism to its environment and the "norms" that preside over this relatedness. Three constituents of this relationship as explicated by Jonas are summarized: (1) since the organism is always threatened with non-being, it must of necessity always re-achieve its continued being by its own activity, (2) organisms are both enclosed within themselves, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environments and interacting with them, and (3) organisms are both dependent on their own material components at any given moments and independent of any particular collection of these components across time. Since these three constituents of the organism-environment relationship are governed by norms the organism is also seen to valorize certain aspects of its environment and not others. In accordance with Canguilhem's conception of pathology as both restricting the organism's possibilities and causing pain and suffering, we examine two personality types, the anti-social personality and the type that H. Tellenbach and A. Kraus call typus melancholicus. Changes in social environments greatly alter what can be termed the "pathology" of these personality types. We conclude by invoking Erwin Straus on the differences between norm and pathology of I-world relationships. relationships.
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.
Abnormal Psychology. A psychology of disorders (Handbook of Critical Psychology)
The earliest traces of psychology as a field of knowledge can be found in the domain of philosophy. Since the classical age, philosophers have reflected on the human being, human nature, the relation of the human being to their context, and on thought as the expression of their insertion in the world. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that psychology separated from philosophy , emerging as an autonomous scientific discipline. Historical and social conditions – the promotion of the bourgeoisie and of scientific knowledge by the power structure – put an end to metaphysical speculation and gave rise to a scientific approach to the natural world and the human being. The autonomy achieved by scientific disciplines such as physiology, astronomy, and biology, provided psychology with a model for its own development, linked to a model of study of the natural sciences (Seidmann 2000). At the dawn of experimental psychology, Wundt (1879 in Seidmann 2000) overcame the resistance to consider psychology a science by making it possible, it seemed, to measure and quantify the contents of consciousness. Psychological phenomena were explained according to the canonical experimental sciences of those days, which were grounded in the positivist epis-temology prevailing in the medical and biological sciences. The experimental method would later be complemented with psychometric tests and standardized questionnaires to study all psychological functions. As Cole (1999) explained, there was a search for a unified science and a unified methodology, modelled after the natural sciences. As a result of this influence, the twentieth century saw a strengthened psychology that contributed to creating room for knowledge, control, and naturalization, thus leading to descriptions of human phenomena based on values of normality and abnormality. Patterns were systematized for organizing human perception, learning, and development, and these patterns were claimed to be true and valid for every person, everywhere, and in every historical period. As a normal social science, psychology reproduced the principles of classical psychiatry, thus pathologizing subjective suffering. However, it focused not only on clinical practice, but also on the evolutionary processes of human development such as birth, adolescence, old age, sexuality, pain, and death. What mattered was evaluating and measuring psychological processes in terms of certain 'normal', general, and transcultural parameters. Everyday life began to be organized according to explanatory narratives of feelings and events as normal or abnormal – evaluated as
Philosophical Anthropology: Its Relevance for Psychiatry
2001
At the root of many issues debated today in psychiatry lie basic conceptions of human nature. Arguments regarding the fruitfulness of biopsychosocial, integrative, or reductionistic models, biological versus social causality in mental illness, the adequacy of existing nomenclature and classificatory schemes, the role of psychotherapy, and numerous others reach no decisive resolution because the proponents of the different arguments presuppose fundamentally different views of human existence. It would seem best then to address the topic of human existence directly and explicitly. Yet no one can address this topic today without granting full weight to the findings and claims of those many sciences and disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and biology, that already concern themselves with things human. And herein lies precisely the largest conceptual problem: the empirical sciences of human life display no coherent and unified theoretical orientation. Empirical studies approach human life from a bewildering variety of "standpoints" and "perspectives." If the anarchy of "standpoints" in the human sciences is to be reduced, some overarching conceptual framework must be developed for them. And if this framework is to provide intellectual guidance for psychiatry in particular, it must meet specific requirements. It is undeniable first that any theoretical framework that is to be serviceable for psychiatry must ascribe a central place to human biology and to the rapidly growing field of neuroscience. It is evident secondly that this general theory must delineate the shaping of the human being through interpersonal relationships; it must be shown how interaction with a sociocultural environment influences the cognitive, emotional, and conative components of the human mind-brain. And thirdly the formation of the human individual through social interaction must become clear in its earliest stages. We suggest that the most promising prospects for such an overarching theoretical framework lie in an orientation which in Continental Europe is called "philosophical anthropology." In this phrase the term "anthropology" retains its etymological meaning as the logos, science, of anthropos, the human. The narrower discipline which is labeled "anthropology" in English-speaking countries is usually called "ethnology" in Continental Europe. Philosophical anthropology found its place within medicine years ago although that place has since been neglected. During the first half of this century, stubbornly irresolvable arguments regarding diagnosis and treatment led some physicians in Continental Europe to raise in a fundamental way the perplexing problem of human nature. Unlike earlier thinkers, however, they realized that this question could no longer be considered solely a "metaphysical" one. With the impressive growth of empirical scientific research into animal and human life, such as biology, zoology, psychology, and sociology, these physicians perceived the possibility of developing a comprehensive theory of human beings through a critical rethinking of empirical data. In addition to drawing on the many empirical sciences, this field adapted certain concepts from the emerging philosophy of human existence. The philosophical categories, however, were re-evaluated and redefined in the light of empirical findings. The central intellectual task lay in constructing a unified view of the multiple facets of human existence that the natural and social sciences as well as philosophy were progressively disclosing. Contrary to "existential philosophy" which conceived humans in total abstraction from their rootedness in nature, the "anthropologists" sought to understand human beings as natural living beings. They began, therefore, with the phenomenon of life itself, a phenomenon which is then conceived in different ways by philosophy and the natural and social sciences. This European orientation was called "anthropological medicine."
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.
Personality, pathology and mindsets: part 2–cultural traits and enantiomers
Purpose -Based on the cybernetic agency theory of part 1, the paper creates a parallel theory to Maruyama's Mindscape theory called mindset theory, relying on the three-trait organisational value system of Sagiv and Schwartz that arises from extensive theoretical and empirical work on cultural values originally undertaken by Shalom Schwartz. The derived normative personality types are embedded into a cultural system and interacting with a social system. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach -First, the paper deals with Sorokin's theory of the immanent cultural dynamics arising from swings between more sensate or more ideational culture. For characterisation of interaction with the social environment, the paper relies on the dramatist/ patterner trait from empirical work by Shotwell et al., which acts as an attractor of agency behaviour. Thus, the paper designs a five trait agency model, with one trait that serves as an attractor of agency behaviour, three formative normative personality traits, and one social trait that directs the how of behaviour.