The Neo-Kraepelinian Movement in American Psychiatry

Abstract

During the 1950s and 1960s, there was an increasing dissatisfaction with the topic of psychiatric classification. The reason for this dissatisfaction was the concurrence of three different attacks on classification. These were the ideas (1) that psychiatric diagnosis, as standardly practiced, was unreliable; (2) that classification was associated with the medical model; and (3) that diagnosis has the negative consequence of assigning labels, thereby potentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Each of these attacks is briefly discussed here in turn.

Perhaps I believe that the world can get forward most by clearer and clearer definitions of fundamentals. Accordingly I propose to stick to the tasks of nomenclature and terminology, unpopular and ridicule-provoking though they may be.

Southard, 1919, as quoted by Menninger, 1963, p. 3