Schneider, Kurt

   (1887–1967)

   The leading psychopathologist after Karl Jaspers, Schneider was born in Crailsheim, a small town in southwest Germany, into the family of a jurist. He studied medicine in Berlin and Tübingen (graduated in 1912). Enthralled by Robert Gaupp’s lectures in psychiatry at Tübingen, he trained in psychiatry at the Lindenburg clinic in Cologne, served as an army psychiatrist in the period 1914–1918, then returned for his Habilitation to Cologne, earning simultaneously a Ph.D. in philosophy under Max Scheler (1874–1928), an influential phenomenologist. In 1931, he became director of the clinical service of the German Psychiatric Research Institute (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie) in Munich and chief psychiatrist of the adjacent Munich-Schwabing Hospital. During the Second World War, he again served as an army psychiatrist in the campaigns in Russia and France, and at war’s end, in late 1945 he became professor of psychiatry in Heidelberg, stepping down in 1955. Schneider is best known to international audiences for his distinction between vital and reactive depression in 1920 (See Depression: Emergence: vital depression) and for devising in 1939 the first-rank criteria, thought to be almost pathognomonic for diagnosing schizophrenia. (See Schizophrenia: Emergence: Kurt Schneider’s first rank . . .) He is not to be confused with Carl Schneider (1891–1946), professor of psychiatry in Heidelberg in the period 1933–1945, who committed suicide in an American military prison.