[Ecology of depression and sexuality in the climacteric and involution in the female]

The evaluation of psychiatric histories of 56 women from the age of 45 to 60 diagnosed as monopolar depressions demonstrates the incongruence of natural-scientific and interpreting (hermeneutic) competence. In 60% of the cases no details about the gynecological anamnesis could be found; in 36% informations about the sexual selfperception by the patients were available; these informations were not placed under a specific category of anamnesis but scattered throughout the text and left a exigency of interpretation. Gynecological pains in a wider sense appeared in half of the cases. These datas are put in the frame of a specific, socially preformed idea of female aging, which indeed gives place to the here studied depressive syndrome, but not to a suitable mode of expression according to age, sexual desire resp. female individuality. The term of "ideal motherliness", i.e. a motherliness without the obligation to produce children, is introduced here as a possible therapeutic and social criticism. The interdependence of sexual mode of expression on one side, which is granted or not granted from a certain age on, of psychiatric symptoms becoming relevant and a fitting niche on the other is called 'ecology' with regard to the said background and according to Bateson. So the dysfunctional stabilization of the patient is regarded as a reflexive kind of way.