Eugen Bleuler

Infobox Scientist
name = Eugene Bleuler
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image_width = 150px
caption =
birth_date = April 30, 1857
birth_place = Zollikon, Switzerland
death_date = July 15, 1939
death_place = Zollikon, Switzerland
residence = Zurich
citizenship = Swiss
nationality = Swiss
ethnicity = German
field = Psychiatry
work_institutions = Rheinau-Zurich clinic
Burghölzli clinic
Univ. of Zurich
alma_mater = Univ. of Zurich
doctoral_advisor = Jean-Martin Charcot
Bernhard von Gudden
doctoral_students = Manfred Bleuler
known_for = Schizophrenia
Autism
author_abbrev_bot =
author_abbrev_zoo =
influences = August Forel
Sigmund Freud
influenced = Carl Jung
prizes =
religion =
footnotes =

Paul Eugen Bleuler (April 30, 1857 – July 15, 1939 [Eugen Bleuler. www.whonamedit.com. URL: [http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/1294.html http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/1294.html] . Accessed on: May 2, 2007.] ) was a Swiss psychiatrist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness and coining the term schizophrenia.

Bleuler was born in Zollikon, a small town near Zurich in Switzerland, to Johann Rudolf Bleuler, a wealthy farmer, and Pauline Bleuler-Bleuler. He studied medicine in Zurich, and later studied in Paris, London and Munich after which he returned to Zurich to take a post as an intern at the Burghölzli, a university hospital.

In 1886 Bleuler became the director of a psychiatric clinic at Rheinau, a hospital located in an old monastery on an island in the Rhine. Rheinau was noted at the time for being backward, and Bleuler set about improving conditions for the patients resident there.

Bleuler returned to the Burghölzli in 1898 where he was appointed director.

In the 1890s Bleuler became interested in Sigmund Freud's work, favorably reviewing Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's Studies on Hysteria. Like Freud, Bleuler believed that complex mental processes could be unconscious. He encouraged his staff at the Burghölzli to study unconscious and psychotic mental phenomena. Influenced by Bleuler, Carl Jung and Franz Riklin used word association tests to integrate Freud's theory of repression with empirical psychological findings. For a time Bleuler even consulted Freud about his own self-analysis. As the leader of a major teaching and research hospital, Bleuler's support for Freud was very important to the early growth of psychoanalysis. By 1911, however, Bleuler withdrew his support for psychoanalysis.

Bleuler is particularly notable for naming "schizophrenia", a disorder which was previously known as "dementia praecox". Bleuler realized the condition was neither a dementia, nor did it always occur in young people ("praecox" meaning early) and so gave the condition the purportedly less stigmatising but still controversial name from the Greek roots "schizein" (σχίζειν, "to split") and "phrēn", "phren-" (φρήν, φρεν-, "mind"). Bleuler treated celebrated Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky after his breakdown in 1919.

Bleuler coined the New Latin word "autismus" (English translation "autism") in 1910 as he was defining symptoms of schizophrenia, deriving it from the Greek word "autos" (αὐτός, meaning "self"). [cite journal|author=Kuhn R; tr. Cahn CH|title=Eugen Bleuler's concepts of psychopathology|journal=Hist Psychiatry|volume=15|issue=3|date=2004|pages=361–66|doi=10.1177/0957154X04044603|pmid=15386868 The quote is a translation of Bleuler's 1910 original.] According to the "Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis" by Charles Rycroft, it was Bleuler who introduced the term "ambivalence" (in 1911).

Bleuler is also recognized today for having a different neurological disorder called Synesthesia, in which information from the sensory systems crosses over with the result that an individual experiences one sensation as another -- tasting colours, hearing numbers or seeing music, for example.

References

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publication-date=2007 Jun
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publication-date=2006
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pages=504–8
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periodical=The American journal of psychiatry
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* George Makari, Revolution in Mind:The Creation of Psychoanalysis, (Harper Collins, 2008)

External links

* [http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9015643/Eugen-Bleuler Eugen Bleuler] - Encyclopædia Britannica.
* [http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/114/4/299.pdf Response to fellowship lecture on Eugen Bleuler] - Comments by E.E. Krapf in the American Journal of Psychiatry (PMID 13458491).