Eugen Bleuler's schizophrenias - Synthesis of various concepts

Abstract

The historical roots of the concepts of schizophrenia are (1) the nosographical era of constructing disease entities, leading to Kraepelin's nosopoietic act of collecting polymorphous psychoses in two big groups: affective disorders and dementia praecox; (2) the model of dissociation as psychic mechanism, applied primarily to hysterical phenomena, but later extended for the interpretation of many psychopathological manifestations. This model led E. Bleuler to propose the name schizophrenia. But in the course of Post-Kraepelin-Psychiatry this dynamic concept of dissociation was almost lost and reserved for the nowadays "dissociative phenomena". A continuum of dissociation is proposed between normal/adaptive/healthy, modest and severe pathological syndromes (in posttraumatic stress disorder, borderline, dissociated identity disorder) and the most severe dissociation, the ego fragmentation in schizophrenic syndromes.