ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the concept of schizophrenia is the product of the psychoanalytical discourse in the sense that it is repudiated. It also discusses a book named Dementia praecox or the group of schizophrenias. In it, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler introduces the neologism schizophrenia as a better fitting description for what Emil Kraepelin in 1893 presented as dementia praecox. Schizophrenia groups a collection of psychoses which develop now chronically—then by surges—which may stagnate at every stage and also re-enact every stage. The group of the schizophrenias therefore regroups, according to Bleuler, apart from the cases of dementia praecox. The chapter further points out that Karl Jaspers in 1923 still mentions hysterical deliria and that in this connection he explicitly refers to the work of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on the matter. He also emphasizes on more than one occasion the analogy between hysterical deliria and twilight states, described by J. Ganser in incarcerated persons.
