This article is only available in the PDF format. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables.
Kretschmer's book "Der sensitive Beziehungswahn," first published in 1918 and now available in a second improved and enlarged edition, is an important contribution to psychopathology. On its first appearance, it met with a great deal of criticism both in Europe and in this country. Kraepelin, whose gradual development of the paranoia concept was one of the starting points of Kretschmer's investigations, did not feel that he could accept the author's conclusions. Some of Kraepelin's pupils ardently discussed the book. In the intervening decade, as Kretschmer shows in the introduction to this second edition, the influence of his monograph has become more and more apparent and widespread.
Kretschmer describes a new disease picture to which he has given the not entirely fortunate name "sensitive Beziehungswahn." What seemed at first glance a continuation of older clinical methods with their creation of nosologic entities was really much less in the fundamental intention and