Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/9



To Kraepelin belongs the credit of having introduced new life into psychiatry by his indefatigable study of his patients for long years, his keen clinical insight, and especially by an independence of thought which led him to fearlessly shatter the traditions of centuries as regards the classification of mental diseases. As a pupil of Wundt he was able to apply new methods of clinical investigation drawn from psychology. As is well known he has brought together mania and melancholia as a single disorder under the title manic-depressive insanity. This conception, vigorously attacked at first, has probably come to stay. It is otherwise with his creation of dementia præcox, which is still strongly objected to in many quarters, chiefly because it seems to be a kind of waste basket into which are thrown all forms of mental disease that cannot be tagged with another name. This disorder appears in so many guises that it is already divided into hebephrenic, catatonic and paranoid groups, and Kraepelin himself has intimated that in time it will be broken up into still further groups or types. It is his merit, however, to have placed before us this psychological species even if the outlines are gross and the details more or less obscure.

In following Kraepelin we find that he only offers us a general and superficial view of the disease. From his description we learn that the patients are peculiar in speech and actions, that they utter numerous senseless remarks, repeat meaningless words or syllables, and that now and then they commit foolish and impulsive acts, but no attempt is made to examine the nature and origin of these peculiar utterances and actions. When we review the cases described in Kraepelin's works we find that whereas most of them show hallucinations and delusions, these are not at all of the same content or nature; the verbigerations and mannerisms, too, differ in different cases. The same similarities and divergences are to be noticed in every hospital. We recall a patient whose auditory hallucinations were attributed to a child,