ABSTRACT
Psychopathy is a general, somewhat vague field in psychiatry, where very various disturbances, neither neuroses nor psychoses, may be grouped. Certain types of psychopathy have, however, gradually received descriptive form, at first in clinical terms. It was one of the results of the stupendous task which Kraepelin set himself, of classifying all disturbances according to their manifestations, that even the psychopathies came to be described with greater clinical exactitude. The next step in scientific research consists, however, in investigating, here no less than elsewhere, the inner structure of these clinical forms, and, where possible, in establishing the sources and circumstances of their development. The attempt to do this in psychiatry for the psychopathies has been a later development than in the case of the neuroses and psychoses. Only a better differentiation of the varieties of personality-structure will enable us to appreciate the essentials in this problem.
