Emil Kraepelin - Influence

Influence

Kraepelin's great contribution in classifying schizophrenia and manic-depression remains relatively unknown to the general public, and his work, which had neither the literary quality nor paradigmatic power of Freud's, is little read outside scholarly circles. Kraepelin's contributions were to a large extent marginalized throughout a good part of the twentieth century, during the success of Freudian etiological theories. However, his views now dominate psychiatric research and academic psychiatry, and today the published literature in the field of psychiatry is overwhelmingly biological in its orientation. His fundamental theories on the etiology and diagnosis of psychiatric disorders form the basis of all major diagnostic systems in use today, especially the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV and the World Health Organization's ICD system. In that sense, not only is Kraepelin's significance historical, but contemporary psychiatric research is also heavily influenced by his work.

Kraepelin in general has been described as a 'scientific manager' and political operator, who developed a large-scale, clinically oriented, epidemiological research programme. He took in clinical information from a wide range of sources and networks. Despite proclaiming high clinical standards for himself to gather information 'by means of expert analysis of individual cases', he would also draw on the reported observations of officials not trained in psychiatry. He has been described as a bourgeois or reactionary citizen.