PERSONALITY TRAITS AND RELATED CONDITIONS, FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF GENETIC CIRCLES1
Aníbal Silveira
Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Jundiaí, SP, Brazil
From 1930 through 1952 we studied at Juqueri State Hospital, near São Paulo, 4.766 patients, whose heredological records enabled us to evolve a four grade scale of genetical taint. Thereafter, in our routine work at a Health Clínic, in São Paulo City, we could scan out by 1966, under such criterion, 6.110 among 7.025 not mentally disturbed counseless – ranging from infants to adults. A survey of the collected data suggests a gradiente of 6 levels – instead of the conventional 3 ones, for assessment of genetic circles. These levels would range from constitucional mental illness down to psychic trends evidence only at occasional breakdowns. Within epilepsy area we found, besides seizures and paroxysms, 1) 8 categories of clinical patterns: 3 kinds of endogenous benign psychoses described by Kleist; asthenic, unstable and explosive personalities; compulsion neuroses; conversion hysteria; 2) 6 types of abnormal traits: irritability, obstinacy, perseveration, suggestibility, mysticism, fanatismo; 3) toxic twilight states or stupor; 4) 9 related familial clinical conditions: headache, somnanbulism or childhood hyperactivity, pavor nocturns, enuresis, dysgenesis – somatic or neural – abortion, stillbirth, eclampsia, death at childbirth. Such traits, arrived at empirically, were later on verified as statistiocally significant by a female collaborator.
- II nd World Congress of Biological Psyquiatry, Barcelona, Spain, september/1978 ↩︎