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Michael Alan Schwartz

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Alan Schwartz.

3 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Philosophical anthropology and psychiatry: typus melancholicus as a human disposition.

Key ideas of philosophical anthropology furnish the framework for a description of the personality type, typus melancholicus. These key ideas are: (1) all living beings are related to and interact with their environments, (2) all living beings must maintain their identities in distinction from their environments, (3) the biological constitution of human beings leaves them instinct-deficient, (4) the human-world relationship must therefore be partially determined by cultural shaping, and (5) social roles and norms determine the consciousness and behavior of human beings. "Dispositional vectors" are basic tendencies within human beings that move them toward particular forms of world-relatedness. These dispositional vectors are: over-identification with social norms (hypernomia), struggle with social norms (agonomia), under-identification with social norms (hyponomia), and over-identification with personal norms (idionomia). When the dispositional vector of hypernomia moves in a pathological direction, it becomes the personality type, typus melancholicus. The two fundamental features of typus melancholicus are hypernomia and intolerance of ambiguity.

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PubMed2003

Schizophrenia as a temporal mode of being: an existential "ante-festum" impatience.

We suggest in a phenomenological perspective to consider schizophrenia as a special form of human temporality. From this perspective, we view the symptoms of schizophrenia as actions undertaken by subjects to stabilize themselves in existence. From this vantage, we describe the clinical expression of the disorder as a type of "existential impatience", characterized by a painful and elusive "now". This present time posits the prime moment of the constitution of the person. Existential impatience reflects from our patients the persistence of excessive efforts towards individuation. Schizophrenia. In human life in general, individuation consists in an unceasing dynamic process of building up of the self. This process starts with the non-self and particularly with the other. Therefore, the emergence of any relation within the self is grounded in the relation with the other and is based on the relation the other establishes with himself. Schizophrenia distinctly displays the two constitutive moments of "being oneself." These moments are generally linked for all of us: an "unending coming to oneself" (difference of identity), and a "continuous maintenance of being a self" (identity of difference). Existential impatience is not only an irritability of a formal order. Existence itself is impatient in the schizophrenic experience as it hastens to reach human goals while trampling on an "ante-festum" temporal mode. This "before-the-feast" temporal structure is dominated by the shiver before an unknown future, a sign of a basic quest for a task. Schizophrenic "ante-festum" is both a constant fear of being unable to come to oneself and a desperate effort to reach this unknown future. If psychopathology claims to settle [establish] that "order" and "measure" would constitute the two fundamental anthropological bases of human being, impatience of existence draws the emblematic figure of the disorder of measure as a referential motion of the birth of any temporalisation. Such considerations suggest the value, in treatment and rehabilitation, of praising patience and focusing on building, or re-building, the past. The main objective is to reach a maieutics of the self based on relationships in the community and with care-givers, all within an accompanying structured, daily framework.

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