1938 – Actuality Of The Kretschmer's Sensitive Delusion Of Reference In The Dsm v Era: Two Case Reports

Abstract

The sensitive delusion of reference has been coined by Kretschmer in 1919. This delusion reaction comports three levels:

1. 1) the sensitive character that is defined as shy, hyperemotives and sensitives subjects that are marked by a high sense of moral values, pride, a relational hyperesthesia resulting a high vulnerability in social contacts, and a tendency to self-criticism to internalize painfully failures and susceptibility.

2. 2) A traumatic event that reveals the subject its own failure and who humiliates him on the plan ethics.

3. 3) It follows then the delusion of reference itself with: depressive remorse with hypochondriac fears and thoughts of persecution on conversations of a great banality of everyday life.

It settled in adults (usually after 35 years), ‘old singles’, or ‘young masturbators’. It is generally complicated with severe depressive episodes. Evolution is less often chronic than in the other paranoias, however, even after a favorable development, the signs are likely to reappear on the occasion of a new disappointment.

The French Psychiatry school individualizes this syndrome within non-dissociative chronic delusions, among the paranoid delusions, hallucinatory chronic psychosis and paraphrenia. In DSM-IV, the sensitive delusion of reference is classified under delusional disorder category with all not dissociative chronic delusions. In the current conceptual reduction, we illustrate this fine entity by two clinical vignettes.