Psychopathological considerations on the semantic confusion between mood and affect.

The discussion is anchored in the transcultural, organismic pervasive character of psychopathologically relevant depressive and manic reality construction; it attacks, however, the exclusion of these mood states from the normal behavior repertory. The hypothesis is advanced that both phenomena represent inborn dialectical logical instruments of evolution-like human identity creation and maintenance. Therefore, from a psychotechnical viewpoint, mood is a meta-concept in regard to all experiential, communicative, self-defining facets of human polythematic existence to which emotion-related linguistic labels can be affixed.