ABSTRACT

Psychiatric Observations on the Temperaments. As might have been expected, the mental and nervous disorders could not be studied without offering some suggestions in regard to the temperaments. The contact, however, did not become definitely established until Kraepelin’s comprehensive systematization of the prime disorders. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when the psychological conception of insanity became ingrained in the fundamentals of psychiatry, a number of monographs appeared dealing with various phases of the adjacent territories, which naturally were to culminate in the joint scrutiny of personality on the part of psychology and psychiatry. Some of these investigators like Hirt and Hoffmann singled out the temperaments for special study, while others like Koch, Kollarits, Kronfeld, and Kretschmer (the opposition here between the H’s and the K’s is quite fortuitous) put all the weight on the concept of character, and for this reason we shall reserve their treatment for their proper rubric.