Inhibition: History and meaning in the sciences of mind and brain

In the last third of the 20th century, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) became an icon of postpsychoanalytic medical-model psychiatry in the United States. His name became synonymous with a proto-biological, antipsychological, brain-based, and hard-nosed nosologic approach to psychiatry. This article argues that this contemporary image of Kraepelin fails to appreciate the historical contexts in which he worked and misrepresents his own understanding of his clinical practice and research. A careful rereading and contextualization of his inaugural lecture on becoming chair of psychiatry at the University of Tartu (known at the time as the University of Dorpat) in 1886 and of the numerous editions of his famous textbook reveals that Kraepelin was, compared with our current view of him, 1) far more psychologically inclined and stimulated by the exciting early developments of scientific psychology, 2) considerably less brain-centric, and 3) nosologically more skeptical and less doctrinaire. Instead of a quest for a single "true" diagnostic system, his nosological agenda was expressly pragmatic and tentative: he sought to sharpen boundaries for didactic reasons and to develop diagnoses that served critical clinical needs, such as the prediction of illness course. The historical Kraepelin, who struggled with how to interrelate brain and mind-based approaches to psychiatric illness, and who appreciated the strengths and limitations of his clinically based nosology, still has quite a bit to teach modern psychiatry and can be a more generative forefather than the icon created by the neo-Kraepelinians.

https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.15050665

Emil Kraepelin: Icon and Reality

This essay examines in detail one episode in the relationship between psychology and the American military during World War I – the decision to establish a program of army-wide intelligence testing – in order to investigate what can happen when members of a particular scientific community, in this case American psychology, must persuade a different community, the military, of the value and authority of their knowledge and practices. It is a story of negotiation and transformation.

Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence

While best known in the anglophonic world for his work on sexual deviations and his advocacy for degeneration theory, Richard Krafft-Ebing (RKE) (1840-1902) was a major figure in late-19th century European psychiatry and author of the most widely read German psychiatric textbook of that era. With the goal of (re-)introducing his work to an anglophonic audience, we review and provide an historical context for RKE's etiologic theory of major psychiatric illness. RKE saw psychiatric disorders as multifactorial, arising from two sets of etiologic factors: predisposing and exciting. Exciting causes were either psychological or physical, while predisposing causes were either general (e.g. sex, occupation, age) or individual-specific. Three major individual-specific risk factors were of particular importance: heredity, personality and education/rearing. Hereditary factors were typically the most important but were usually non-specific in their effect with the forms of psychiatric illness often differing in close relatives. He emphasized the importance of the 'neuropathic personality,' which rendered affected individuals sensitive to the pathogenic effects of various exciting influences. Poor rearing could also substantially increase risk for major mental illness. RKE saw the influences of hereditary and rearing factors on psychiatric illness as often mediated through a neuropathic personality. While RKE believed in degeneration theory and emphasized the potential etiologic importance of masturbation in psychiatric illness, his clinical writings were otherwise characterized by a broad-minded and sensible approach that lacked the narrowness of the strongly brain-based or psychoanalytic psychiatric schools which were very influential during and shortly after his life.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's views on the etiology of major psychiatric illness.

On Professionalization in Psychology.

Psychology occupies a peculiar place among the sciences, suspended between methodological orientations derived from the physical and biological sciences and a subject matter that extends into the social and human sciences. This article traces the history of psychology from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Early in the field’s history, psychologists distanced themselves from spiritualists and psychical researchers and embraced empirical methods of natural science. In the twentieth century, schools of thought—psychoanalysis, behaviorism, Gestalt, cognitive, operationalist, and neo-behaviorist—diverged within the field. Government programs during World War II and public visibility helped to shape the field. Academics and practitioners of the various schools agreed on the importance of scientific methods of research and experimentation. Given the century-long struggle for scientific and professional autonomy and authority, psychology today is diffuse and widespread.

The Uses and Usefulness of Psychology

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The Uses and Usefulness of Psychology