Emil Kraepelin as a historian of psychiatry – one hundred years on

Brückner, Burkhart

doi:10.1177/0957154x221143613

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Engstrom (1991; and Weber (2016a, 2016b) argue that Kraepelin embodied multiple roles, including that of an experimental psychologist, scientific manager and political operator. A recent study also highlights Kraepelin's contributions as a historian of psychiatry (Brückner, 2023). No matter how multifaceted Kraepelin's character might have been, he was more than a psychiatrist who pioneered modern diagnostic classification; he was a figure of social, political and historical significance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Emil Kraepelin’s eugenic arguments

Yamamura,

Murai

2024

Hist Psychiatry

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It is widely recognized that Emil Kraepelin explicitly advocated for eugenic ideas in his academic works. Given the renewed interest in related concepts such as self-domestication and neo-Lamarckism in different contexts, this article revisits his eugenic arguments by scrutinizing a section of his seminal work, the 8th edition of his textbook published in 1909. Our analysis reveals that Kraepelin’s arguments consisted of multiple theories and ideas prevalent at the time (i.e. self-domestication hypothesis, neo-Lamarckism, degeneration theory, social Darwinism, racism and ethnic nationalism), each of which presented individual fundamental claims. Nevertheless, Kraepelin amalgamated them into one combined narrative, which crystallized into an anti-humanistic psychiatry in the next generation. This paper cautions that a similar ‘packaging of ideas’ might be emerging now.

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