Volitional Disorders

Since the second half of the twentieth century, textbooks of neurology and psychiatry have rarely alluded to the psychopathology of will (or volition). As a result, conditions that were once subsumed under the rubric of disorders of will have been assigned to other diagnostic categories. Here, we attempt to begin to fill this gap with a discussion of the will based on classical psychopathological and current clinicopathological literature. The psychopathology of will should be reintroduced into neurology and psychiatry textbooks and into medical programs as an essential step toward a comprehensive medical training and an indispensable theoretic construct for research.