Well-bred and educated, she was fluent in French and German, interested in philosophy, and fond of music, poetry and art.

After a while, the family moved to Ryazan, the regional capital, where his father started teaching at a high school for boys.

An excellent student, Pyotr was always sociable, honest, and inclined to irony; he nursed a dislike for severe discipline.

It was then that he read Sechenov's 1863 monograph "Brain Reflexes", a successful attempt to describe the physiological mechanisms of mental activity.

In 1893 Gannushkin graduated from the high school with a gold medal, the highest award, and entered the department of medicine at Moscow State University.

In his third year of studies, he finally decided to become a psychiatrist after being influenced by such university professors as Aleksei Kozhevnikov and Sergei Korsakoff.

As Korsakoff explained, "mental patients should not be regarded as soulless creatures: they should be considered personalities familiar to everyone who is somehow related to them.

"[7] In addition to attending lectures and recitals during his university years, Gannushkin served as an orderly with the responsibilities of a junior medical staff member.

[10][11] In 1902, at the suggestion of Sukhanov, Serbsky, and Rossolimo, Gannushkin was made a full member of the Moscow Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists (Russian: Московское общество невропатологов и психиатров).

At the same time, he was elected a supernumerary assistant at the psychiatric hospital headed by Serbsky, after Korsakoff's early death from heart failure.

Sukhanov managed to stir Gannushkin's interest in these issues and the two developed friendly relations, publishing six research papers together.

The focus then shifted to works by Wilhelm Griesinger, Bénédict Morel, and Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal.

Next Gannushkin presented observations made by Sergei Korsakoff, Vladimir Serbsky, Emil Kraepelin, and Eugen Bleuler.

It was then that he began to deliver his course of lectures on "The Theory of Pathological Characters" (Russian: Учение о патологических характерах).

In 1911 university autonomy became a crucial issue in Russia, leading to repressive measures by the Tsar's protégé Lev Kasso, the education minister.

Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University) and director at the University Psychiatric Hospital: today this is known as the Korsakov Clinic of Psychiatry at the Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy (Russian: Клиника имени С. С. Корсакова АМН России имени И. М. Сеченова).

This reaction type is expressed by symptoms of dysphoria, i.e. malicious actions combined with anger, anguish, and fear.

[17] Not a committed proponent of Freud's theory, Gannushkin did believe that under certain conditions psychoanalytical methods could be used as part of the process of treatment.

They had one son Alexey Petrovich Gannushkin (1920-1974) who was an aircraft design engineer, USSR State Prize Laureate, and father of Svetlana Gannushkina (b.

Svetlana Alexeyevna Gannushkina is a mathematician and human rights activist, working particularly to help immigrants and refugees through the Civic Assistance NGO.

An experienced clinician, he was a proponent of the natural science method who considered himself an enemy of pompous and meretricious declamation.

[24][25] Gannushkin's power of observation was enhanced by his erudition and ability to discern the most useful points in a variety of different monographs and articles.

"[19]While Gannushkin was finishing his seminal work on the Manifestations of psychopathies: their statics, dynamics and systematic aspects (Russian: Клиника психопатий, их статика, динамика, систематика), his health quickly deteriorated.

[28][29] In 1933, the Health Care Commissariat's Research Institute of Neuropsychiatric Treatment established an annual Gannushkin award.

[32][33] Gannushkin was immortalised in fiction as Professor Titanushkin, a character in Ilf and Petrov's satirical novel The Little Golden Calf (1931).

In Manifestations of psychopathies: statics, dynamics, systematic aspects (1933), Gannushkin distinguished two types of pathological development: constitutional and situational.

The situational development of psychopathy is evidently caused by trauma or distress: its onset is always marked by some serious mental change, after which everything becomes more or less static.

Borderline psychiatry, he was at pains to emphasise, includes a wide range of different transitional steps and transient mental states.

He acknowledged that psychopaths (i.e. those with borderline and antisocial personality disorders) have made substantial contributions to science, scholarship, art, and literature.

[11][35] Gannushkin delineated the three main signs of behavioral pathology that underlie psychopathies: Some elements of Gannushkin's typology were later incorporated into a theory developed by Andrey Yevgenyevich Lichko, another Russian psychiatrist interested in personality disorders together with their milder forms, the "accentuations of character" (Russian: акцентуации характера).