Changes in the Prognosis of Functional Psychoses Since the Days of Kraepelin

1967 ◽  
Vol 113 (501) ◽  
pp. 813-822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Örnulv Ödegård

My choice of Kraepelin as a point of departure for this lecture has definite reasons. If one wants to stay within the field of clinical psychiatry (as opposed to psychiatric history), that is as far back as one can reasonably go. By this no slight is intended upon the pre-Kraepelinian psychiatrists. For our topic Henry Maudsley would indeed have been a most appropriate starting point, and by no means for reasons of courtesy. His general point of view is admirably sound as a basis for the scientific study of prognosis in psychiatry. I quote: “There is no accident in madness. Causality, not casualty, governs its appearance in the universe, and it is very far from being a good and sufficient practice simply to mark its phenomena and straightway to pass on as if they belonged not to an order but to a disorder of events that called for no explanation.” On the special problem of prognosis he shows his clinical acumen by stating that the outlook is poor when the course of illness is insidious, but this only means that these cases develop their psychoses on the basis of mental deviations which go very far back in the patient's life, so that in fact they are generally in a chronic stage at the time of their first admission to hospital. Here he actually corrects a mistake which is still quite often made. He shows his dynamic attitude when he says that prognosis is to a large extent modified by external conditions, in particular by the attitude of friends and relatives. Maudsley's dynamic reasoning was limited by the narrow framework of the degeneration hypothesis of those days. He had a sceptical attitude towards classification, which he regarded as artificial and dangerously pseudo-exact. His own classification was deliberately provisional, with very wide groups. He held that a description of various sub-forms of chronic insanity was useless, as it would mean nothing but a tiresome enumeration of unconnected details.

2020 ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
David Menčik

The starting point of the essay is clarifying the difference between the mono-perspective and multi-perspective vision of reality. Off-course the terms perspective, mono-perspective and multi-perspective are not self-explanatory and the meanings of these terms need to be formally analysed. After making the formal difference between mono-perspective thinking and multi-perspective thinking a content difference needs to be made. Namely, why is the Renaissance vision of reality multi-perspective and the Middle-Age vision of reality mono-perspective? The answer to this question needs to be given by the analysis of the original works of the Renaissance thinkers. Our undertaking will not be limited in analysing only one discourse but following the subject from a methodological point of view in a multi-perspectivism way. Therefore, three different discourses will be analysed:  The discourse of philosophical anthropology with Mirandola’s vision of man as a paradigmatic example-The discourse of philosophy of nature, with Bruno’s vision of the universe as a paradigmatic example-The discourse of art history in which four paintings will be analysed: these paintings can be considered of having philosophical, value because they provide a picturesque representation of what the Renaissance “world” was really like.


2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 352-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Peperkamp

This article addresses the distinctive spiritual qualities of aerial movement. Taking as a point of departure the feature lm Maria, Mãe do Filho de Deus (2003) played by famous Brazilian Padre Marcelo Rossi, it argues for an engagement with cinematic images in terms of aerial dynamic imagination. It will be shown that the “inspired breath” of Padre Marcelo organizes the universe and affects the constitution of subjects and space in the lm according to the Scriptures. The same aerial dynamic applies to his other contexts of performance such as Byzantine praying techniques and their relation to space. Subsequently, the article explores underlying analogies between electronic technology, acoustic environment, and pneumatic spirituality within common practices of embodied experience.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dariusz Łukasiewicz

In the article, first I present the atheistic argument from pointless evil and the argument from chance. The essence of the argument from chance consists in the incompatibility of the existence of purposeless events and the existence of a God who planned the universe to the last detail. Second, I would like to show that there is a relation between the evidential argument from evil and the argument from chance. An analysis of the theistic argument from small probabilities is a helpful starting point for the presentation of how the two arguments are related.


Trictrac ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liliana Danciu ◽  
Petru Adrian Danciu

The axes of the creation and birth of the imaginary as a mythical language. Our research follows the relationships of the concepts that are taking into account creation on the double axis of verticality and horizontality. We highlight those symbolic elements which would later constitute the mythical language about the sacred space-temporality. Inside this space-temporality a rich spectrum of mythical images develops; images capable of explaining the relationships of the creation plans. Without a religious perception of the temporality, the conceptualization of the axis would remain a philosophical approach. Through our point of view, the two are born simultaneously. Thanks to them, creation can be imagined. The first “frozen” formula of the mystical human spirit can be thought, brought to a palpable reality, expressed in an oral and then a written form. Studied together, temporality (sacred or not) and space are permanently imagined together. For example, a loss of mundane temporality in the secret ecstasy that offers to the soul an ascending direction does not mean getting out of universal temporality, but of its mundane section. In the sacred space the soul relates to time. Even the gods are submitted by the sacred, Aeon sometimes being synonymous to destiny. The universal creator seems to evade every touch, but not consistently, only when he avoids the descent into its created worlds. In sacredness, time and space seem or become confused, both expressing the same reality, by the immediate swing from thinking to deed. The mythical imagery conceives the displacement in the primary space-temporality by the spoken word. So, for something to appear and live, the spoken word is required. Even the divine dream appears as a pre-word of a creator’s thought. The thought follows the spoken word, the spoken word follows the gestures which finally indicate the meanings of the creative act, controlling the rhythm of the creation days. These three will later be adapted through imitation in rite. We are now situated at the limit of the physical world, a real challenge for the mythical imagery. The general feature of the mythical expression on the creation of the material world is the state of the divinity’s exhaustion, most often conceptualized by sacrifice or divine fatigue. The world geography identifies with the anatomy of a self-gutted god. Practically, material creation is most likely the complete revelation of God’s body autopsy. As each body decomposes, everything in it is an illusion. An axial approach of the phenomenon exists in all religious systems. The created element’s origin is exterior, with or without a pre-existing matter, by a god’s sacrifice or only because it has to be that way. This is the starting point of the discussion on the symbolism of axiality as a reason for the constitution of the language of creation, capable of retelling the imaginary construction of myth in an oral and then written form.


2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 1993-2005
Author(s):  
Shemsije Demiri ◽  
Rudina Kaja

This paper deals with the right to property in general terms from its source in Roman law, which is the starting point for all subsequent legal systems. As a result of this, the acquisition of property rights is handled from the historical point of view, with the inclusion of various local and international literature and studies, as well as the legal aspect devoted to the respective civil codes of the states cited in the paper.Due to such socio-economic developments, state ownership and its ownership function have changed. The state function as owner of property also changed in Macedonia's property law.The new constitutional sequence of the Republic of Macedonia since 1991 became privately owned as a dominant form of ownership, however, state ownership also exists.This process of transforming social property into state or private (dissolves), in Macedonia starts from Yugoslavia through privatization, return and denationalization measures, on which basis laws on privatization have been adopted. Because of this, there will be particularly intensive negotiations regaring the remaining state assets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 400-410
Author(s):  
Valentina De Luca ◽  
Luigi Mandrich

: Enzymes are among the most studied biological molecules because better understanding enzymes structure and activity will shed more light on their biological processes and regulation; from a biotechnological point of view there are many examples of enzymes used with the aim to obtain new products and/or to make industrial processes less invasive towards the environment. Enzymes are known for their high specificity in the recognition of a substrate but considering the particular features of an increasing number of enzymes this is not completely true, in fact, many enzymes are active on different substrates: this ability is called enzyme promiscuity. Usually, promiscuous activities have significantly lower kinetic parameters than to that of primary activity, but they have a crucial role in gene evolution. It is accepted that gene duplication followed by sequence divergence is considered a key evolutionary mechanism to generate new enzyme functions. In this way, promiscuous activities are the starting point to increase a secondary activity in the main activity and then get a new enzyme. The primary activity can be lost or reduced to a promiscuous activity. In this review we describe the differences between substrate and enzyme promiscuity, and its rule in gene evolution. From a practical point of view the knowledge of promiscuity can facilitate the in vitro progress of proteins engineering, both for biomedical and industrial applications. In particular, we report cases regarding esterases, phosphotriesterases and cytochrome P450.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 784-795
Author(s):  
Krisnna M.A. Alves ◽  
Fábio José Bonfim Cardoso ◽  
Kathia M. Honorio ◽  
Fábio A. de Molfetta

Background:: Leishmaniosis is a neglected tropical disease and glyceraldehyde 3- phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) is a key enzyme in the design of new drugs to fight this disease. Objective:: The present study aimed to evaluate potential inhibitors of GAPDH enzyme found in Leishmania mexicana (L. mexicana). Methods: A search for novel antileishmanial molecules was carried out based on similarities from the pharmacophoric point of view related to the binding site of the crystallographic enzyme using the ZINCPharmer server. The molecules selected in this screening were subjected to molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations. Results:: Consensual analysis of the docking energy values was performed, resulting in the selection of ten compounds. These ligand-receptor complexes were visually inspected in order to analyze the main interactions and subjected to toxicophoric evaluation, culminating in the selection of three compounds, which were subsequently submitted to molecular dynamics simulations. The docking results showed that the selected compounds interacted with GAPDH from L. mexicana, especially by hydrogen bonds with Cys166, Arg249, His194, Thr167, and Thr226. From the results obtained from molecular dynamics, it was observed that one of the loop regions, corresponding to the residues 195-222, can be related to the fitting of the substrate at the binding site, assisting in the positioning and the molecular recognition via residues responsible for the catalytic activity. Conclusion:: he use of molecular modeling techniques enabled the identification of promising compounds as inhibitors of the GAPDH enzyme from L. mexicana, and the results obtained here can serve as a starting point to design new and more effective compounds than those currently available.


This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.


Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 331
Author(s):  
Daniele Giansanti ◽  
Ivano Rossi ◽  
Lisa Monoscalco

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) during the COVID-19 pandemic is there for all to see, and has undoubtedly mainly concerned the activities of digital radiology. Nevertheless, the strong perception in the research and clinical application environment is that AI in radiology is like a hammer in search of a nail. Notable developments and opportunities do not seem to be combined, now, in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a stable, effective, and concrete use in clinical routine; the use of AI often seems limited to use in research applications. This study considers the future perceived integration of AI with digital radiology after the COVID-19 pandemic and proposes a methodology that, by means of a wide interaction of the involved actors, allows a positioning exercise for acceptance evaluation using a general purpose electronic survey. The methodology was tested on a first category of professionals, the medical radiology technicians (MRT), and allowed to (i) collect their impressions on the issue in a structured way, and (ii) collect their suggestions and their comments in order to create a specific tool for this professional figure to be used in scientific societies. This study is useful for the stakeholders in the field, and yielded several noteworthy observations, among them (iii) the perception of great development in thoracic radiography and CT, but a loss of opportunity in integration with non-radiological technologies; (iv) the belief that it is appropriate to invest in training and infrastructure dedicated to AI; and (v) the widespread idea that AI can become a strong complementary tool to human activity. From a general point of view, the study is a clear invitation to face the last yard of AI in digital radiology, a last yard that depends a lot on the opinion and the ability to accept these technologies by the operators of digital radiology.


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