Affective Dependence: From Pathological Affectivity to Personality Disorders

Abstract

Starting from the general concept of affectivity, the present work focuses on the clinical, neurobiological, and dysfunctional aspects of the morbid condition, when dysfunction gradually becomes first an affective addiction and then a symptom of a psychopathological personality picture, thus suggesting a multidimensional treatment. From affective dependence to personality disorders, about the dynamics of human bonding, to the implications determined by the attachment theory, trying to demonstrate that the clinical category of affective dependence cannot be considered simply a form of behavioral dependence, as erroneously done in the last decade, but as a symptom of a psychopathological manifestation of personality, in a framework of diagnostic transversality.