Translation Rights TQE / Conducts and Attitudes

« The two volumes that make up his extraordinary biography are among the most important personal documents in our historical memory. » Emilio Lledó, El País

All conducts are produced according to a specific context and attitude. The attitude is the affective and emotional factor that modulates the conduct and transforms it into the action that each of us takes before a specific situation. This triple axis – conducts, attitudes, and acts – brings about a fundamental feature of the subject: his essential lack of stability, the constant process of construction and deconstruction with which he adapts to each context.

Both this oscillation within the versatility of human behavior and the need to conquer an identity that is familiar allow the eminent psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino to explore the complex lattice of acts and typified forms of conduct: for instance, envy, jealousy, deceit, suspiciousness, irony, or extravagance, which help us to face the world and to present ourselves as subjects in different situations. And if psychology recognizes the mutual interaction between the cognitive and emotional aspects that characterize us, anthropology (as studied by Cassirer, Simmel, Weber, Dilthey, or Jaspers) allows us to see the actor, the character that we are and that we construct in our social interactions.

The author turns to one of his favorite fields of study in which he made bright and fascinating contributions: the anthropological roots of conduct; an investigation that is always oriented at finding an idea about mankind without turning its back on the contributions of Philosophy or Greek tragedy, nor on the explanations of human conduct approached by great novelists and playwrights.

Carlos Castilla del Pino was born in 1922 in San Roque, Cádiz. For five years he worked in Madrid´s Ramón y Cajal Institute until he became director of the Psychiatric Clinic of Córdoba in 1949. In this city he has also been head of the Department of Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine. He is a tireless traveller and will go wherever it is required in order to share his knowledge. As an essayist of international prestige, he is the author of a considerable amount of works among which are: Un estudio sobre la depresión (A Study on Depression,1966), La Culpa (Guilt, 1968), Psicoánalisis y marxismo (Psychoanalysis and Marxism, 1969), La incomunicación (Lack of Communication, 1970), Introducción a la psiquiatría (Introduction to Psychiatry, 1979-1980), Estudios de psicopatología sexual (Studies in Sexual Psychopathology, 1984), Teoría de la alucinación (Theory of Hallucination, 1984), and Cuarenta años de psiquiatría (Forty Years of Psychiatry, 1987). He has also published works of fiction such as Una alacena tapiada (A Walled-in Cupboard, 1991), and Discurso de Onofre (Onofre´s Discourse) published by Tusquets Editores in 1999.