A DYNAMIC INTERPRETATION OF KRETSCHMER'S CHARACTER TYPES

Abstract

In his illuminating and stimulating work on “Physique and Character,” Kretschmer1 has opened up new vistas in both descriptive and interpretative psychiatry. The basis of this work is limited to the two principal psychotic groups, the manic-depressive and the schizophrenic, and in it Kretschmer has attempted to correlate the character types or temperaments and the physical configuration in these two groups. Without entering into details concerning this attempted correlation for which perhaps further clinical investigation may be necessary through psychiatric research and anthropological methods, it may be of practical interest to reinterpret these character types on the basis of the libido theory, particularly since by means of such an interpretation, there may be formulated certain view-points for an analytic approach to the problems of psychiatry. This paper will be limited to an interpretation of Kretschmer’s work as a central point of discussion and will not attempt to describe the primitive, archaic elements in the psychoses. Kretschmer’s classification of cycloid and schizoid shows a close similarity with the direction and flow of the libido in the psychoanalytic or dynamic sense. For instance, the personality traits and the thinking processes of the schizoid are narcissistic, those of the cycloid, object-libidinal. In the schizophrenic this narcissism corresponds to the well-known negativism or negative transference, in the manic-depressive we have the accessibility or the positive transference. Such an interpretation may be of practical value in the prognosis of the psychoses, particularly those mixed types into which enter difficulties of differential diagnosis, such as the cyclothemic with schizoid thrusts or the schizophrenics with cycloid thrusts.