ABSTRACT
The historical evolution of psychosis theories is traced from their origins several hundred years ago when afflicted persons were treated like subhuman moral degenerates and criminals, and “treatment” consisted of imprisonment and torture. Subsequently as medicine and psychiatry became professions that recognize psychosis as a disease, “treatment” evolved to primitive surgeries and torture-like devices and techniques designed to rid the person of the diseased part. In the first half of the 20th century Bleuler coined the terms dementia praecox and schizophrenia to denote what he and Kraepelin believed to be a dementing neurological disease of young adults, inaugurating the era of eugenics, sterilization, and lobotomy. When Freud created psychoanalysis he did not knowingly treat severely ill hospitalized patients and he accepted the psychiatric “wisdom” of his time that their defect rendered them unable to become neurotic and to benefit from a psychoanalytic treatment. His beliefs have been reflected in subsequent psychoanalytic theories and institutional practices.
