W. Griesinger and the mechanicist conception of psychiatry (from about 1845 to about 1868)

pp. 86-155

in: Gerlof Verwey, Psychiatry in an anthropological and biomedical context, Berlin, Springer, 1985

Abstract

In the discussion of L. Snell's "clinical-psychopathological phenomenology" at the end of the first chapter we touched briefly on a subject which we must now look at in depth. This is the fact that the period in which 'scientific" psychiatry came into being — between the appearance of the first issue of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie in 1844 and Griesinger's publication of theArchiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten in 1867 — was dominated by the opposition between anthropologically oriented psychiatry and natural scientific psychiatry.