A psicopatologia da afetividade: aspectos conceituais e históricos

disorders of the affects have contributed little to the diagnostic definition of mental illness, and their phenomenological description never attained the stature of the psychopathologies of perception or of cognition. this article shows how the subordinate role played by the affects in the western conception of man led to an original but persistent perspective of mental illness as an exclusive disorder of the intellect. attempts by 19th-century psychiatrists to contest this notion were only partially successful because of the difficulties in the conceptual handling of most emotional behaviors and the terminological redundancy that this engendered. these efforts were frustrated by the rise of associationism, the emergence of experiments on cerebral locations, the peripheral definition of the emotions and, finally, by the development of darwinism. as a result, no autonomous psychopathology of the affects was ever developed. in addition, the eventual recognition of the so-called "primary" humor disorders failed to lead to a refinement in the semiology of the experiments carried out. this process was greatly hampered by the use of descriptive behavioral substitutes or by metapsychological descriptions of the affects as a form of energy or as a drive. none of these developments contributed to a clinical description of the disorders of humor.