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Moral insanity referred to a type of mental disorder consisting of abnormal emotions and behaviours in the apparent absence of intellectual impairments, delusions or hallucinations. It was an accepted diagnosis in Europe and America through the second half of the 19th century. The physician James Cowles Prichard first used the phrase to describe a mental disorder in 1835 in his ''Treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind''.〔James Cowles Prichard (1837) (''A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind'' ), Carey & Hart, Philadelphia〕 He defined moral insanity as: "madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations."〔Quoted in: 〕 The concept of moral insanity was indebted to the work of physician Philippe Pinel, which was acknowledged by Prichard. Pinel had described mental diseases of only partial, affective, insanity. His concept ''Manie sans délire'' (Latin - ''mania sine delirio''; French - ''folie raisonnante'' or ''folie lucide raisonnante'', ''monomanie affective''; German - ''Moralisches Irresein''〔Tuke, Daniel Hack (ed.) (1892). ''A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine. Volume 2.'' J. & A. Churchill. p. 813.〕) referred to insanity without delusion. That is, the sufferer was thought to be mad in one area only and thus the personality of the individual might be distorted but his or her intellectual faculties were unimpaired. The term 'moral', at that time and taken originally from French, could mean emotional rather than necessarily referring to ethics. ==Diagnostic schemes== The term 'moral insanity' had been used earlier by Thomas Arnold (physician) and Benjamin Rush in referring to what they saw as a result of madness – a disruption or perversion of the emotions or moral sense. This usage had little to do with Prichard's diagnostic definition of the term as a form of madness itself, however.〔 Overall, Prichard defined insanity as a "chronic disease, manifested by deviations from the healthy and natural state of the mind." He then proposed four broad categories. Moral insanity was for disorders that only seemed to arise from a person's feelings and habits, not their intellect. The other three types involved increasing degrees of intellectual abnormality: a partial derangement that was limited to certain trains of thought; a full mania, by which was meant 'raving madness' regardless of topic; and lastly, a breakdown of any connections between ideas, referred to as incoherence or dementia. Prichard considered that some early nosologists, namely Sauvages, Sagar and Linnaeus, had distinguished between medical conditions with hallucinations and those involving depraved appetites or feelings. But he credits Pinel as the first in psychiatry to clearly distinguish madness without delerium, in opposition to Locke's widely accepted axiom that insanity always stemmed from faulty intellectual connections or mistaken perceptions. However, Pinel's concept focused on a frenzy of the passions, particularly involving rage and violence. For Prichard the typical syndrome was more a form of extreme eccentricity, and he would later refer to Pinel's type as a madness of the instincts. Prichard was an adherent of what was known faculty psychology, which attempted to divide the mind into different functions or abilities, but not phrenology, which attempted to locate them below specific parts of the skull. He was also influenced by a school of thought associated with the physician Nasse, which posited disorders of emotions or temperament rather than intellect.〔 Prichard also considered a complex categorical scheme developed by Heinroth, concluding that a number of disorders in different divisions of that scheme would be more simply gathered under the heading 'moral insanity'. He suggested the category could also be termed 'parapathia', or alternatively 'pathomania' by analogy with monomania. The latter term had been introduced by the physician Esquirol, who had succeeded Pinel, to refer to a form of insanity where there is a fixation or excess in only one area. It was also used widely by Étienne-Jean Georget. It was theorized to be caused by a split in the faculties of the mind. Prichard considered his first category of intellectual (rather than moral) insanity, to be equivalent to monomania. This in turn meant that the symptoms of moral insanity could increase, causing an overall degeneration into monomania. "On the surface, monomania can thus appear even more circumscribed a form of derangement than moral insanity." However, Esquirol by contrast considered moral insanity to be simply one form of monomania. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Moral insanity」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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