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The author is deputy director of the Psychiatric University of Basel (Switzerland), whose former chairman, Prof J. E. Staehelin used the conception of "emotional psychosis" for the first time in 1946. He intended to separate certain schizophrenic-like reactions in emotional stress from schizophrenic psychoses considered "principally incurable" by most European Psychiatrists. Staehelin as well as Labhardt, his pupil, still are opposed to the "American tendency" to efface the difference between neurosis and psychosis and to treat organic psychoses psychoanalytically.
On the other hand, the author agrees with M. Bleuler (Changes In the Theory of Schizophrenia, 1951) that there is not one single unit, but rather a whole group of schizophrenic disease, that the study of the schizophrenic personality as well as individual life experiences prior to psychosis is important, and that psychological penetrance should replace purely descriptive procedures. Depth psychology and phenomenology (Daseins analysis), structural analysis, as