Andrey Yevgenyevich Lichko

Accentuations of character His monograph entitled "Psychopathy and Accentuations of Character of Teenagers" (1977) has become an indispensable textbook for many generations of Russian psychiatrists and psychologists. For writing this book, Andrey Lichko was awarded the Honorary Certificate n.a. V.M. Bekhterev by USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. In this monograph, Andrey Lichko has enriched the theory of psychopathy (what is known today as personality disorders) by demonstrating that along with psychopathy it is necessary to distinguish the so-called accentuations of character. Lichko's typology has parallels with those of Karl Leonhard and Pyotr Gannushkin.

Persons with accentuations of character are placed somewhere between mentally sane persons and psychopaths (those who have different personality disorders). Referring to the famous monograph by the German psychiatrist Karl Leonhard, "Accentuated Persons", Andrey Lichko emphasized that it is more correct to use the term "accentuations of character" instead of the term "accentuated personality" because personality appears to be a wider notion, which includes IQ, skills, worldview, and so on.

With his theory of accentuations of character, Andrey Lichko has contributed to the understanding of etiology of neuroses by proposing the concept of the so-called "locus of the least resistance" (locus minoris resistentiae) within the character structure.

This conception emerged as the result of elaboration of the idea of the "individual sensibility" to psychic traumas proposed by the eminent Russian developmental psychologist, Vladimir Nikolayevich Myasishchev. By improving and elaborating the conception of "situativity" and "individual hypersensibility" to outside influence, Andrey Lichko has developed the theory stating that each type of accentuation of character has its own different "Achilles' Heel". On the assumption of these observations, Andrey Lichko supposed that neurosis is mostly linked with the juxtaposition of a pathogenic situation and the individual peculiarities of character.