Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

withdraw from social contact and lose touch with reality. As a result their social and
occupational functioning deteriorates and about 10 % of all those initially affected
become long-term hospital in-patients.35 What Bleuler, some years later introduced as
schizophrenia was an expansion and elaboration of Kraepelin's dementia praecox.
Bleuler believed that its variable manifestations were due to a splitting of psychic
functions or a loss of co-ordination between the cognitive (intellectual) and the
conative (emotional) aspects of the personality. The subject ceases to experience his
mental processes and his will as under his own control. Above all, the patient loses his
vivacity and drive, he loses his interest in and capacity to respond emotionally to other
people and he becomes increasingly more apathetic, eccentric and isolated.36
Since Emil Kraepelin first isolated this disorder from a confusing array of psychic
disturbances and Eugen Bleuler introduced the broader term schizophrenia, it has been
the focus of twentieth-century psychopathology and an immense amount of data have
been amassed on the subject. Nonetheless, the state of knowledge remains far from
satisfactory. Not only do generations of researchers in every conceivable discipline
disagree on what schizophrenia is, they are also highly uncertain about what causes it
and no really decisive progress in forms of therapy has been made. Striking
fluctuations occur even in the definition of the illness.37
There is no sound evidence that its incidence has changed in the past 100 years, and it
occurs in much the same form and with much the same frequency throughout the
world, regardless of differences in environment, language, creed, or social structure.
Neither do wars or other catastrophic events appear to influence its incidence.38 Due
to its severity schizophrenia, of all mental illnesses, is the most feared and the most
fascinating, just as it is the model for the layman's concept of madness. The fears and
frustrations it engenders are also a fertile breeding-ground for fanciful theories of
causation. In the beginning schizophrenia had been perceived as a suffering from
some type of alteration in the relation to the sense of self or a flight from reality caused
by biochemical and genetic disfunctions. It was defined as a disease with an (almost)
inevitably bad outcome which caused many patients to be labelled as incurable. Such
negative concepts set in motion vicious circles with the worst consequences: self-
35 Gilman, Sander L.: Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness.- Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985.- p. 225
36 cf. Bleuler, Manfred: Forschungen und Begriffswandlungen in der Schizophrenielehre, 1941-1950.- In: Fortschritte der
Neurologie und Psychiatrie 9/10 (1951), pp. 385-453.- Janzarik, Werner: Themen und Tendenzen der
deutschsprachigen Psychiatrie.- Berlin: Springer, 1974.-
37 Cf. Stephens, J. H. et. al.: Long-term Prognosis in Schizophrenia.- In: American Journal of Psychiatry, 126 (1969), pp.
498-504
38 For more information on statistics see Compi, Luc: The Psyche and Schizophrenia: The Bond between Affect and Logic.-
Transl. by Deborah Lucas Schneider.- Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press, 1988.-
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