Citation

Barcia Salorio D. Arch. Psiquiatr. 2010; 73(1).

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Fundación Archivos de Neurobiología, Publisher Editorial Triacastela)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

Biographical analysis is essential from an anthropological perspective. This fact leads towards the need to study, among other features, the relationship between the mentally ill and their values. The author believes that each mental illness is characterised by a specific failure in the patient's capacity to hold values, an understanding of which might lead to a better understanding of each particular illness. This difficulty in the capacity to hold values is to be named anomia, a term first introduced into psychiatry by Benjamin Rush in 1796. If we set aside disorders associated with severe cognitive impairment (such as severe learning disability and dementia) and schizophrenias where patients inhabit a peculiar world, different from that of the healthy, the remaining mental disorders can be classified into four different categories: 1) Anomia as a constitutive incapacity to grasp values: the kind of anomia that B. Rusch defined as characteristic from psychopathies. 2) Anomia as due to an inability to transcend. As Tellenbach showed, this kind of anomia is characteristic of the melancholic's world. 3) Anomia due to the lack of values from a social origin, which can be divided into two types: Durkhein's anomia, the kind that Frankl characterised by the feeling of senselessness (Sinlosigkeitsgefühl), which may lead to suicide, and Merton's anomia, resulting from the incapacity found in certain members of a particular society to meet the established values, found in criminals and drug-addicts. 4) Anomia based on value repression, which corresponds to certain kinds of neurosis, such as Frankl's nooneurosis.

Language: es

Keywords

human; suicide; Suicide; dementia; schizophrenia; article; mental disease; cognitive defect; neurosis; social psychology; Biography; melancholia; mental patient; offender; drug dependence; learning disorder; defense mechanism; Melancholia; psychopathy; Values; anomia; Anomia; Nooneurosis; Psychopathies; Social derangement