[Subjective aspects of psychopathologic research. A method for assessing anxiety in melancholic patients]

Psychopathological assessment of anxiety is subject to considerable methodological problems. An immediate access to an understanding of anxiety is not possible. Rather, anxiety reveals itself to the investigator from the patients' experience, as it comes to light in their self-reports, i.e. from a subjective aspect. Based on these considerations, a semistructured clinical interview was developed for recording anxiety in endogenous depression (syn. melancholia). The decision not to employ a highly structured interview procedure is substantiated by clinical examples. Nevertheless the rules of psychopathometry can be applied to the interview. With the reliability-validity dilemma in mind, the method of psychopathological research proposed occupies an intermediate position between descriptive-phenomenological and "quantitative" psychopathology.