[Ethological approach to seasonal depression and manic-depressive psychoses].

Some psychotherapists disagree with the importance of seasonal factors and sunlight in the etiology of depressions and bipolar disorders. Depression in spring and summer, mania in autumn and winter do not seem consistent with the expected effects of light on mood. Ethology offers an explanation: the variations of photoperiod can have opposite effects, depending on individuals, on territorial and hierarchical tendencies which constitute biological roots of mood disorders.

[Ethological approach to menopause: an introduction to evolutionist medicine].

Menopause is a phenomenon particular to the human species. It exists in nature only in very few animals. In an evolutionist view, it appears as an adaptation, the function of which was to protect prehistoric women from dangerous late pregnancies and to enhance survival of their last-born child and grandchildren.

[Phylogenetic origin of symptoms in psychopathology. Exemplified by hysteria].

Setting behavioral disturbances affecting humans in a natural environmental context indicates the presence of phylogenetic components in their etiology. Hysterical conversion disorders provide a good illustration. The biological model to which they can be traced seems to be the "distraction display," originally intended to deceive predators and lure them away from the offspring or threatened related individuals.

[Evolutionary psychiatry].

The author's perspective is that of a naturalist and ethologist. In this paper, he looks for evidences of phylogenetic components inherited from evolutionary adaptive behaviours in the etiology of psychopathological syndromes: bipolar depressions, seasonal affective disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, hysterical syndrome, impulsive behaviours, eating disorders, etc. Evolutionary psychiatry which sets present human pathological behaviour in the context of our species past evolution and of our ancestor's adaptations to their natural environment, leads the psychopathologist to revise certain of classic concepts in this field and resort to some of the concepts used by the ethologists, such as territory, hierarchy, allo-grooming and altruistic behaviour.

[From pseudopregnancy to anorexia nervosa].

Translated in the primeval environment where humanization evolved during millions of years (man's environment of evolutionary adaptation, according to Bowlby), the characteristic behaviours of anorectics and bulimics do not look unfavourable but on the contrary adaptive, helping to the survival of the group or kinship (hyperactivity, altruistic feeding, etc.). Analogies, indeed homologies, exist in many animal species, distant or closely related to us (social insects, birds, mammals including primates) observed in nature.