THE NATURE OF MIGRAINE
It was, therefore, also with some hesitation that I accepted the invitation, humbly realizing that I can bring my audience nothing new, and when now, I nevertheless venture to try to speak about the nature of migraine seen from my point of view after a long life of work with migraineological problems, I do it to a very limited extent only on the basis of my own experience, but first and foremost because I base my opinion on the facts with which friends and colleagues have enriched our knowledge through their research, not only through numerous literary publications and lectures, but also and not least through the answers to personal inquiries which I have received with thanks in the course of time.
Psychiatric aspects of headache.
: Psychological factors, such as psychological stressors, personality style, conditioning, and psychodynamic issues, play a role in the etiology of chronic migraine and muscle contraction headaches. Psychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety, personality disorders, conversion, and hypochondriasis, may accompany and complicate headache. Psychiatric diagnosis and treatment add a useful and important dimension to the medical care of the patient. This article presented a useful conceptual model for discriminating between different kinds of psychological influencing factors and guidelines for selecting the appropriate form of psychiatric treatment.
Time and Heritage
As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.