Abstract
Starting in the 1950s, Gerd Huber, the major German pupil of Kurt Schneider, gradually evolved a concept of minus or negative symptoms in schizophrenia, which were not, like Bleuler's, behavioral but experiential in kind. He called these phenomena the basic symptoms (HBS), regarding them as uncharacteristic because they also occurred in other psychiatric disorders. Nonetheless, Huber paradoxically considers the HBS essential for theoretically understanding the origin of schizophrenic illness. A few of his speculations in this direction are briefly given. However, the main emphasis in this paper is on the descriptive. Thus, the essential relationship of the HBS to the phenomenology of Huber's pure defect is highlighted. The latter concept states that there are many post-psychotic schizophrenic deterioration syndromes in which only prominent basic symptoms are present and no Bleulerian core or/and accessory features occur. Moreover, eight measures representing the central phenomenological areas covered by the HBS are then presented in some detail; three of these are shown to be the experiential mirror images of Andreasen's negative symptoms as described in the SANS.
Published Version
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