EUGEN BLEULER AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIA

One of the most influential psychiatrist of his time, who differentiated several forms of mental illness classified as schizophrenia, a term he introduced. Contrary to prevailing opinion, he contended that schizophrenic patients are not necessarily incurable or lacking in affective, or emotional, life and that their mental deterioration is not necessarily inevitable.

In his psychological-humanistic approach to therapy, he anticipated modern psychiatric trends.

Professor of psychiatry at the University of Zürich and director of its Burghölzli Asylum (1898-1927), BLEULER first advanced the term schizophrenia in a classic paper (1908) based on a study of 647 Burghölzli patients. His stastements on the nature and symptoms of schizophrenia are still regarded as valid. The work that established his eminence was Dementia Praecox Gruppe der Schizophrenien (1911).

One of Bleuler´s major contributions to psychiatry was his discovery of a universal human element in mental illness. He regarded the mental element processes of deranged persons as fundamental similar to those of normal persons, and he suggested that schizophrenics are not

"simply demented, but merely demented with respect to certain questions, at certain times, and in response to certain complexes"

He also stressed the importance of distinguishing primary symptoms of the disease process from resulting secondary symptoms.

In his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (1916), Bleuler described autism as withdrawal from reality and showed its role in the development of paranoia, a condition characterized by the presence of delutions and, possibly, hallucinations.

He described ambivalence as the coexistence of mutually exclusive contradictions within the psyche. He was among the first to acknowledge the contribution of Sigmund Freud but broke with him on the grounds THAT FREUD´S POSITION WAS INIMICAL TO THE BEST INTEREST OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION.

His Autistisch-undisziplinierte Denken inn der Medizin und seine Überwindung (1919; "Autistic and Undisciplined Thought in Medicine and Its Control") appeared in a fifth edition in 1962.