Witchcraft, Psychopathology and Hallucinations

leastâ€"to distinguish patients diagnostically.This makes no assumptions about the existence of other syndromes or diagnostic groups.Dr. Rosenthal's speculations, that factor scores on his autonomous factor i may represent the degree of development of somatic concomitants of illness, and factor scores on his self-pitying factor 2 the modifica tion of the symptom picture by pre-existing neurotic personality features, are interesting and may be true.But this dual hypothesis is a relatively complicated one, and its confirmation will be difficult, because methods of measuring somatic changes in depression are not readily available and the assessment of pre morbid personality is not a simple matter.On the other hand, symptoms are more accessible and easy to study, and the hypothesis that at least two types of depression exist, and are recognizable by their symptoms, is the more economical, more useful clinically and likely in our view to be the more fruit ful in the immediate future.We do not, however, at all rule out the possibility that methods of scoring â€oe¿ endogenous―,â€oe¿ neurotic― and perhaps other syn dromes quantitatively (? on the basis of factor scores) will be found to be superior.Even if symptomatically different depressions could be firmly tied to different personalities, the origins of the latter would still need to be inquired into, and aetiological issues would merely have been pushed back to an earlier stage.So the problem of how different kinds ofdepression arise would remain.In any case, dualistic (or pluralistic) hypotheses certainly do not rule out relationships between illness and personality or other characteristics, but symp toms appeartoprovidethemost convenient pointof departurefor the study of such relationships.Dr.Rosenthal himself seems to make this point when he ends his letter by saying that definition of distinct depressive populations would make it possible to study relatively homogeneous groups (and thus to make comparisons between them), a method â€oe¿ which we may hope will eventually leadtoa greater under standing ofdepression―.