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Nonpsychotic, nonorganic psychopathologies have generally been subdivided into symptomatic disorders and character disorders. In symptomatic disorders, the subject makes a self-diagnosis of psychopathology, often based on an estimation that painful affects such as anxiety, guilt, shame, or depressive feelings of low self-esteem are excessive, given the conditions under which they arise, and/or that they cause inhibitions of action. For instance, a person may conclude that the level of anxiety he experiences in anticipating an examination or an airplane trip is more severe than he can explain as proportional to the risk he judges to be associated with the activity that is feared, and that this contributes to a restriction of performance. Such patients wish to be relieved of specific complaints and are consciously motivated to seek help.
In character disorders, certain activities may feel impulsive to the subject. Other activities may fail to produce the conditions they are consciously intended to achieve, or may have unwelcome consequences. Sometimes people with such character