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A Reappraisal of the Dementia Praecox Concept

Anton O. Kris, MD

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1972;26(4):321-325.

Abstract
Kraepelin's formulation of dementia praecox is reviewed, with the irrelevant and misleading ontological conception of disease, dissected away, to restore his fruitful emphasis on a characteristic tendency toward developmental arrest and regression that produces the picture of deterioration, ie, "dementia." Bleuler's valuable contributions of a biographic approach and wide nosological expansion to include virtually all the functional psychoses are considered. His attempt to apply a psychoanalytic interpretation based principally on symptom analysis and associationism, in the schizophrenia concept, is rejected as premature. A psychoanalytic, characteriological approach along developmental lines that can be integrated with Kraepelin's original formulation is now possible in view of advances in psychoanalytic observation and theory over the past 60 years.

Author Affiliations
Boston

From the Department of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine, and the Boston State Hospital, Boston.

Footnotes
Accepted for publication Aug 19, 1971.

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