ABSTRACT
THE distinction between acute and chronic schizophrenia evolved from the Bleulerian and Meyerian assertions that schizophrenia was not, as Kraepelin had maintained, exclusively a progressive and deteriorating condition. 1 Bleuler cited his extensive clinical experience to demonstrate that many patients who exhibit classical features of dementia praecox as defined by Kraepelin nevertheless recover sufficiently to resume their social and occupational roles. However, Bleuler did not dichotomize schizophrenia into recovering and nonrecovering categories, but rather regarded schizophrenia as a basically chronic condition (1911, pp. 206–208). He avowed, in fact, that he had never seen a schizophrenic patient in whom signs of the disturbance were not still visible, regardless of the degree of social restitution the patient had made (1911, p. 256).
