IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001450838

Perspectivity in Psychiatric Research: The Psychopathology of Schizophrenia in Postwar Germany (1955--1961) (2014)

Ghazal, Yazan Abu (Author)

Medicine Studies
Volume: 4, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 103-111

DOI: 10.1007/s12376-013-0087-2

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

The reorganization of psychiatric knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century derived from Emil Kraepelin's clinical classification of psychoses. Surprisingly, within just few years, Kraepelin's simple dichotomy between dementia praecox (schizophrenias) and manic-depressive psychosis (bipolar disorders) succeeded in giving psychiatry a new framework that is still used until the present day. Unexpectedly, Kraepelin's simple clinical scheme based on the dichotomy replaced the significantly more differentiated nosography that dominated psychiatric research in the last three decades of the nineteenth century (Janzarik in Themen und Tendenzen der deutschsprachigen Psychiatrie. Springer, Berlin, 1974). Moreover, although all the components of the future development were already available shortly after 1868, the real course, which led to Kraepelin's dichotomy, was unpredictable then. This paper explores the ways in which the unpredictability of psychiatric knowledge and the postulate of a rationality underlying psychopathological phenomena interacted in the debates regarding the classification of psychoses. It examines the natural antagonism between the practical aspirations of an increasingly specialized medical nosology and unitary conceptions, which, in a psychopathological countermovement, emphasized that no somatic criteria can be specified for the majority of psychic abnormalities and that all nosological distinctions are not binding (Janzarik 1974, 20). In this context, this paper investigates the revival of unitary theories of psychosis in postwar German psychiatry and seeks to understand why the forms of thinking that dominated nineteenth-century psychiatry have proved to be very lasting. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the perspectivity underlying psychiatric research on psychoses and explores the ways in which writing the history of the schizophrenia concept involves inevitably writing the history of the entire psychiatry.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001450838/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Liesbet De Kock; (2020)
‘I think’ (the thoughts of others). The German tradition of apperceptionism and the intellectual history of schizophrenia (/isis/citation/CBB651883356/)

Chapter Matteo Borri; (2020)
L’evoluzione del trattamento morale: da Philippe Pinel a Emil Kraepelin (/isis/citation/CBB980576552/)

Book Kraepelin, Emil; (2002)
Lifetime Editions of Kraepelin in English (/isis/citation/CBB000201870/)

Chapter Steinberg, Holger; (2005)
Emil Kraepelin in Leipzig: Wie einer Entlassung eine Habilitation folgen kann---Eine Quellenstudie (/isis/citation/CBB001021726/)

Article Decker, Hannah S.; (2004)
The Psychiatric Works of Emil Kraepelin: A Many-Faceted Story of Modern Medicine (/isis/citation/CBB000401251/)

Article Nicolas Henckes; Lara Rzesnitzek; (2018)
Performing Doubt and Negotiating Uncertainty: Diagnosing Schizophrenia at Its Onset in Post-War German Psychiatry (/isis/citation/CBB575071818/)

Article Majerus, Benoît; (2008)
Psychiatrie im Wandel. Das Fallbeispiel Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik (1960--1980) (/isis/citation/CBB001220570/)

Article Facchinetti, Cristiana; Muñoz, Pedro Felipe Neves de; (2013)
Emil Kraepelin na ciência psiquiátrica do Rio de Janeiro, 1903--1933 (/isis/citation/CBB001420641/)

Article Cottebrune, Anne; (2008)
Zwischen Theorie und Deutung der Vererbung psychischer Störungen: Zur Übertragung des Mendelismus auf die Psychiatrie in Deutschland und in den USA, 1911--1930 (/isis/citation/CBB000930740/)

Book Hippius, Hanns; (2008)
The University Department of Psychiatry in Munich: From Kraepelin and His Predecessors to Molecular Psychiatry (/isis/citation/CBB000830856/)

Article Collins, Kenneth; (2008)
Joseph Schorstein: R. D. Laing's “Rabbi” (/isis/citation/CBB000950365/)

Article Carlo Maggini; Riccardo Dalle Luche; (2022)
An overview on Hebephrenia, a diagnostic cornerstone in the neurodevelopmental model of Schizophrenia (/isis/citation/CBB865868388/)

Article Doroshow, Deborah Blythe; (2007)
Performing a Cure for Schizophrenia: Insulin Coma Therapy on the Wards (/isis/citation/CBB000774462/)

Article Birk Engmann; (2022)
On the origins of the concept of ‘latent schizophrenia’ in Russian psychiatry (/isis/citation/CBB771136351/)

Article Jonathan RT Davidson; (2017)
Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919): Psychiatric Hospitalization and the Abduction of an American Landscape Artist (/isis/citation/CBB229487491/)

Book Orna Ophir; (2022)
Schizophrenia: An Unfinished History (/isis/citation/CBB447550162/)

Article Passione, Roberta; (2016)
La psichiatria di Silvano Arieti: Un primo profilo (/isis/citation/CBB919982619/)

Book Decker, Hannah S.; (2013)
The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual's Conquest of American Psychiatry (/isis/citation/CBB001422177/)

Article Connor Cummings; (2017)
The Science of Therapeutic Images: Francis Reitman, Schizophrenia and Postwar Psychiatric Art at the Maudsley and Netherne Hospitals (/isis/citation/CBB939070327/)

Article Evans, Bonnie; (2014)
The Foundations of Autism: The Law Concerning Psychotic, Schizophrenic, and Autistic Children in 1950s and 1960s Britain (/isis/citation/CBB001420182/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}