Personality and mental disorders: sensitive character, melancholic type, and addenda

Abstract

A traditional view in psychiatry is that personality disorders or traits are intimately related to primary mental disorders. Psychic functions with common roots might be constitutive of personality and psychosis or other disorders. Hoche held that paranoia, mania and melancholia lie in the normal psyche, and Kraepelin conceded such a view, explicitly implying personality. According to Carl Schneider, endogenous symptom complexes or associations and normal functional associations are fuzzy. Many other psychopathologists emphasize personality characteristics in connection with endogenous or functional psychoses, such as the sensitive and melancholic types. When adopting a continuum view of mental disorders, they behave in a unitary or systemic configuration, corresponding to endogenous-functional dispositions interacting with the milieu and composing personality.