ABSTRACT
The legacy of Kraepelin to E. Bleuler and modern psychiatry was one of providing a model of a disorder founded in a tradition that stressed an organic approach to mental disorder and which favoured a localisation of function approach. His research methods were empirical and statistical, and his research demonstrated the importance of the course of the disease as a crucial diagnostic factor, though a course which pointed to therapeutic pessimism. Sigmund Freud’s contribution to Bleuler’s thinking on Schizophrenia can be divided into the former’s views specifically on the disorder itself, limited by Freud’s own slight experience of Schizophrenia, and the more important general model of mind that Freud espoused. Bleuler, too, was concerned about the lack of empirical rigour evident in the early psychoanalytical movement. H. Stierlin attributes the rift between Bleuler and Freud to Freud’s view that Bleuler was ambivalent and half hearted about his own views.
