Detlev von Zerssen: Ein halbes Jahrhundert erlebter Psychiatriegeschichte

This report consists of the author’s personal experience in German psychiatry during the second half of the last century. The focus is on scientific development in the area of biological psychiatry, a branch of psychiatry dominated, during the second quarter of the 20th century, by Kretschmer’s constitutional conceptions. These, however, could not be substantiated by the author’s and his co-worker’s extensive research using biometrical and statistical methods still rather unusual for German psychiatry at that time. In particular, the extent as well as kind of correlation between physique and personality and the differences in physical shape between patients with either schizophrenic or affective psychoses were invalidated. The latter could largely be explained by the age dependence of physique and type of psychosis. In the psychopharmacological phase of psychiatric development following that of constitutional biology, the focus of research moved to pharmacology and, in connection with it, to neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology. In this context, objectifying and quantifying techniques, also in the area of psychopathology, became more and more important for biological research in psychiatry. This is exemplified by selected investigations of ours at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. Methodologically, this prepared the ground for the neurobiological phase of development induced by progress in neuroimaging and molecular genetics which marked the transition into the 21st century.

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