[Historical review of the concept of anhedonia].
During the last decades, the term "anhedonia", conceptualized as a incapacity to experience pleasure, have become associated with conditions as different as schizophrenia and depression. This paper deals with the conceptual and historial frames in which anhedonia was first constructed, and shows that the sources for the current fuzziness of this concept include neglect of the fact that anhedonia is conceptually parasitical upon the notion of pleasure, that it has been rather superficially conceptualized as the reduction or abolition in a "putative" function which itself is unlikely to be unitary in nature, and that it has never been quite specified whether the mechanism concerns a deficit in brain signal or not.
Olivares Diez
J M
JM
D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000266:history* / Q000523:psychology; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D010990:Pleasure-Pain Principle; D011599:Psychopathology / Q000266:history