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The British Journal of Psychiatry (1974) 125: 221-229. doi: 10.1192/bjp.125.3.221
© 1974 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
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The Personality in Psychomotor Epilepsy Compared with the Explosive and Aggressive Personality

PER KRISTIANSON 1

1 Department of Psychology, University of Uppsala, Svartbäcksgatan 10, S-753 20 Uppsala, Sweden

The diagnosis of the alcoholic personality poses the special problem of differentiating the explosive aggressivity provoked by chronic alcoholism from the personality of certain epileptics.

The theoretical passages in the previous section of the study relate to a critical survey of the evidence of the epileptic personality and to a comparison of some relevant studies for the selection of a psychometric measurement of adequately defined personality changes for one form of psychomotor epilepsy.

The above-mentioned diagnostic problem is then illustrated by a comparison of the MMPI profile of a sub-group of psychomotor epileptics with bitemporal independent EEG spike foci, which may provide the major epileptogenic correlate of personality disturbances among psychomotor epileptics, with the MMPI profile for a patient with explosive aggressivity caused by chronic alcoholism.

It is interesting to note the coincidence of the values for scales D and Ma in both profiles. The profile for the alcoholic patient is characterized solely by the values of these scales which measure explosive and aggressive reactions. However, the reactions suggested by these scale values in the profile of psychomotor epileptics may only be regarded as partial symptoms of the complete adhesiveness syndrome, according to an analysis of a more complex configuration of almost equally high MMPI scale values, interpreted as measuring this syndrome. The main part of the syndrome with paranoid and perseverative symptoms is, together with the tendency to schizo-adaptive reactions, not characteristic of the alcoholic patient.

The results suggest that the MMPI test offers a means of arriving at a differentiation of the explosive aggressivity caused by chronic alcoholism from the main part of some defined personality changes in one important form of psychomotor epilepsy.

Submitted on May 10, 1973






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Copyright © 1974 The Royal College of Psychiatrists.