Eugen Bleuler

With the death in 1939 of Professor Bleuler, who, like Professor Freud, attained the age of eighty-three, there passes away not only a very distinguished psychiatrist but one of the few remaining links with the early days of Psycho-Analysis, in which he played a not unimportant part. In 1898 he succeeded his old chief Forel as head of the famous Burghölzli Asylum and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich, a post which he held for thirty years. About 1905–6 he became interested in Freud's writings, stimulated at first by his assistant Jung whom he then encouraged to pursue his investigations into Psycho-Analysis. He was present at the first International Psycho-Analytical Congress in 1908, two years after he had written his pioneering work on Affectivity, Suggestibility and Paranoia. He was co-editor with Jung of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische Forschungen, the first psycho-analytical periodical. In 1910 he published his massive defence of Psycho-Analysis, but in 1914, before the German Society for Psychiatry, he read a paper full of criticism of it; in the same year came his description of 'ambivalency', one of the valuable concepts we owe to him. After this he drifted away from psycho-analytical circles and concentrated on his important studies of schizophrenia, a term we also owe to him. Many paradoxes in his work and personality become comprehensible if we suppose that his discovery of ambivalency arose from endopsychic perception. Thus it may be said that no psychiatrist has done more than Bleuler to inculcate the psychological point of view in the study of schizophrenia; yet he maintained to the last that it was an essentially organic disorder. His description of autistic thinking was an original and classical contribution to psychopathology.

I saw much of Bleuler in those early days and we also participated together in the opening exercises of the Phipps Clinic and, a quarter of a century later, in those of the New York State Psychiatr