Schizo-affective psychoses from a phenomenological-anthropological point of view.

Abstract

The presence of schizo-affective psychosis is postulated psychopathologically, if schizophrenic as well as manic or depressive cyclothymic symptoms, respectively, are to be found in the same clinical picture. This circumstance rises the question with what legitimation do we designate a symptom as schizophrenic, etc.? Generally, we call a symptom, e.g., schizophrenic, if: (1) like with K. Schneider's first-rank symptoms the presence of a schizophrenic called entity of syndrome and course of illness is very easy to be recognized by means of the symptom, and (2) the symptom is statistically significantly correlated with this entity. In both definitions the schizophrenic nature of the single symptom remains undetermined. Here the attempt is made to work out a specificity of manic and depressive phenomena, a phenomenological determination of manic-depressive psychosis as an essential entity, respectively, by tracing structural signs of the moods and delusions as well as of the personality of manic-depressives. The same could be done in some way also with schizophrenic psychoses. We believe that only if we arrive at a clearer determination of what is meant by schizophrenic, manic, and depressive not only in a correlative statistical, but also in a phenomenological sense, we might have a chance finally to classify schizo-affective psychosis psychopathologically on an empirical basis.