[Process--development--personality change. Psychotraumatological considerations on basic concepts of psychopathology]

The"erlebnisbedingte Persönlichkeitswandel" (reactive personality change) described by Venzlaff in 1958 is characterized here as a prototype of "enduring personality change after catastrophic experience" (ICD-10 F62.0). The symptoms of this post-traumatic syndrome indicate profound and irreversible changes in the individual's view of the world and herself. Referring to more anthropologically oriented psychotraumatological studies by Straus and Müller-Suur, Venzlaff interprets this syndrome as an "incurable disruption of the patient's existence" ("unheilbarer Bruch der Daseinsordnung"). The author attempts to integrate the phenomenon of reactive personality change into the wider context of the psychopathological problem of process and development and to understand it, in the term of Jaspers' "general psychopathology", as a "psychic process".