Bleuler, Eugen

   (1857–1939)

   Known for his interest in the psychology of schizophrenia and for his coinage of the term schizophrenia, Bleuler was born in Zollikon, near Zurich, into a farming family. During his undergraduate studies in medicine, he decided to become a psychiatrist, and after passing the state exam in medicine in 1881, he became an assistant physician at the university psychiatric clinic Waldau in Berne. He then studied abroad—in London and with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris and Bernhard von Gudden (1824–1886) in Munich—before becoming an assistant of Auguste Forel’s at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic. In 1886, at age 29, he became director of the Cantonal Chronic Care Asylum in Rheinau, and then in 1898 he became Ordinarius professor of psychiatry in Zurich. He was emerited in 1927. In addition to his brief flirtation with psychoanalysis and friendship with Freud, Bleuler is known for his work on affectivity in 1906 (Affektivität, Suggestibilität, Paranoia) and for his careful clinical research on schizophrenia in 1908 and 1911. (See Schizophrenia: Emergence: Bleuler [1908, 1911].) In 1910, he coined the term autism. Bleuler’s other major contribution was his Textbook of Psychiatry (Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 1916), widely used in Europe. In retrospect, Bleuler shifted the emphasis in schizophrenia from course and outcome to the cross-sectional study of symptoms, essentially broadening the concept of the disease and giving it a more generous prognosis.