Abstract

Eugen Bleuler is still best known for coining the term “group of schizophrenias”. After his 1911 schizophrenia book, dementia praecox was no longer necessarily a dementia or a praecox. This entry explains the shift in Bleuler from illness-entities to the speech of the individual patient in terms of Bleuler’s biography, and it demonstrates how Bleuler found the symptoms of schizophrenia intelligible thanks to Sigmund Freud, despite his ambivalence about psychoanalytic theory.