Contesting Schizophrenia?

Abstract

We have seen that problems with the concept of schizophrenia did not go unnoticed. We also saw earlier how surrealist André Breton had condemned Bleuler’s autism as an abusive attack on forms of desertion, refusal, and disobedience. [Similarly, by 1924 Dadaist Hugo Ball’s Sieben schizophrene Sonette further uses the schizophrenic as an exotic device to critique society (Gilman, 1985).] Other reactions could be more pointed. In 1924, for example, Bleuler’s concept was slammed as bizarre, simplistic, vague, arbitrary, and insufficiently comprehensive (De Fleury, 1924). But, for the most part, such early tensions ruffled few feathers within psychiatry. In official psychiatry, acknowledged problems with the conceptualisation of illness remained, at best, an abstract intellectual concern. In 1923, for example, Kraepelin’s successor, Oswald Bumke, cast doubt on the reality of dementia praecox asking, ‘What if dementia praecox simply did not exist?’ Yet Bumke’s resolution to his own question was simply to express a preference for the term schizophrenic reactions (Noll, 2011).