Psychogenic Disease Research Articles

At a time when psychiatry is so occupied with disputes about methods of psychotherapy it seemed that it might be valuable to look at psychiatric material from the objective point of view of symptomatology, course and outcome. It is important to know what disease will do of its own accord. I wonder if the review of cases after decently long periods of time would not bring many surprises to everybody-both as prognosticators and therapeutists. From the time of my introduction to psychiatry in 1914 it seemed to me that the Kraepelinian doctrines have kept an almost strangle hold on psychiatric thinking. Either we have followed slavishly the manic-depressive doctrine and forcibly distorted cases to fit the mold; or, we have rejected the manic-depressive concept and have been tempted to throw overboard all of the virtue of the idea of symptomatology, course and outcome. With the rejection we have reached for (a) complete psychogenic or (b) brain disease explanation. To try to test the wisdom of these conflicting positions, I decided to study a group of cases which I had seen in my private practice in the year of 1929. I selected cases which represented all the cases of affective psychoses t which I had seen in that year. These cases for the most part were referred to me by prominent internists

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