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At 07:43 2-4-98 -0500, Linda wrote: snip >To all listmembers, > > Since posting the abstracts on personality a few days ago, >there has been a lot of discussion on the list about this >subject. Certainly, debate is a good thing, and many of the >responses I received were thoughtful and eloquent, but a few >(not many,but some) were quite angry and seemed to be personally >directed against me. So I'd like to say a few more things. (If >this isn't risk-taking behavior, I don't know what is!) > > First of all - I did not write these articles; snip Dear Linda and others, To get angry reactions after writing about a subject that seemed to be "neutral" and not risky at all is a confusing experience that may happen to everyone who lives in a multi-cultural society ( for example this list) and which only can be avoided by keeping our mouth shut and our thoughts into our heads. The subject we talk about may have for some people a history, that others are unaware of. Our reactions on things we read are not only determined by the text as it is, but by the history determined association it evokes in us. So to understand those reactions one has to search that history. It makes sense to give this some attention, because being more conscious ofone's own associations might prevent much misunderstanding. The following says what associations do come to my mind, when reading about Parkinson and personality. I intend to show, telling this, that about this subject much irritation provoking nonsense is told. The idea that illness is not as capricious as the lottery and we don't have all the same chance developing one is attractive for healthy people, yet more attractive is the idea that we are able to influence that chance and that being healthy is not just luck, but our own merit. The confusing thing about these ideas is that they are not completely untrue. Of course we have some influence on some chances. A woman, who had been a secretary in a outpatient centre for rheuma told me once, she was shocked about the casualness in the talking of much patients about other patients with more severe symptoms than they had themselves, blaming them for that and considering their own lesser symptoms as being their merit. Each time I learned somebody had been cured of cancer and said he owed this totally to his strong wish to stay alive, I did feel pain for people who, to my conviction, had the same wish, not less strong, but who died nevertheless. I suppose we all have at least once felt the uneasiness of being confronted with someone who talked about an uncle or neigbour etc. who was a PWP too, but who was in a so much better shape, just because he fought it and worked so hard, that he had no time to develop more symptoms or something like that. Yet it is worse when to this ideas the Freudian way of thinking about motivation is added. To his opinion all behavior, whether we know it or not, is motivated. So now it is not only the lack of willpower or the lack of wish to live that causes serious illness, but the disease is wanted positively by the patient. He wants it to attrack attention or to punish himself or to be able to dominate his partner, or to get rid of responsibilities.It is clear that believing this, is not believing in the usefullness of the Udall money and to do research to find a cure. From a personal communication I have been told many years ago the following opinion on PD : "PWP's main symptom is that they can not express emotions, so to do that nevertheless they develop a tremor.It is counterproductive to try to help them to get rid of the tremor, because than a more harmfull way may be found to express themselves". This was said in the early sixties , and the professor who said it rejected any remark about the possibility the tremor was a symptom of some neurological damage as being grossly naive. This all may seem to have hardly any relation with the article Linda referred to, which posed in fact another question, not about the personality of people who in the future would develop Parkinson, but about early symptoms and the influence of a diminished dopamine level, which exists many years before Parkinson is manifest. I can not find any reasonable objection against studying the influence of low dopamine levels on behavior. But interpretating the outcome, I would have in mind the danger of confusing visible symptoms with personality traits. Ida Kamphuis -------------------------------------------------------------- Vriendelijke Groeten / Kind regards, Ida Kamphuis mailto: [log in to unmask]