Paul Eugen Bleuler (April 30, 1857 – July 15, 1939)

Eugen Bleuler
Born	April 30, 1857 Zollikon, Switzerland
Died	July 15, 1939 (aged 82) Zollikon, Switzerland
Residence	Zürich
Citizenship	Swiss
Nationality	Swiss
Fields	Psychiatry
Institutions	Rheinau-Zürich clinic Burghölzli clinic University of Zürich
Alma mater	University of Zürich
Doctoral advisor	Jean-Martin Charcot Bernhard von Gudden
Doctoral students	Manfred Bleuler
Known for	Schizophrenia Autism
Influences	August Forel Sigmund Freud
Influenced	Carl Jung

Paul Eugen Bleuler (April 30, 1857 – July 15, 1939) was a Swiss psychiatrist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness and for coining the term "schizophrenia."

Biography

Bleuler was born in Zollikon, a small town near Zürich in Switzerland, to Johann Rudolf Bleuler, a wealthy farmer, and Pauline Bleuler-Bleuler. He studied medicine in Zürich, and later studied in Paris, London and Munich after which he returned to Zürich to take a post as an intern at the Burghölzli, a university hospital.

In 1886 Bleuler became the director of a psychiatric clinic at Rheinau, a hospital located in an old monastery on an island in the Rhine. Rheinau was noted at the time for being backward, and Bleuler set about improving conditions for the patients resident there.

Bleuler returned to the Burghölzli in 1898 where he was appointed director.

Following his interest in hypnotism, especially in its "introspective" variant, Bleuler became interested in Sigmund Freud's work, favorably reviewing Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's Studies on Hysteria. Like Freud, Bleuler believed that complex mental processes could be unconscious. He encouraged his staff at the Burghölzli to study unconscious and psychotic mental phenomena. Influenced by Bleuler, Carl Jung and Franz Riklin used word association tests to integrate Freud's theory of repression with empirical psychological findings. As a series of letters demonstrates (published in English in 2003), Bleuler performed from 1905 a self-analysis in correspondence with Freud, mostly in order to submit the new psychoanalytic method to empirical verification. ^[3] As the leader of a major teaching and research hospital, Bleuler's support for Freud was very important to the early growth of psychoanalysis. By 1911, however, Bleuler withdrew his support for psychoanalysis.

Bleuler is particularly notable for naming schizophrenia, a disorder which was previously known as dementia praecox.^[4] Bleuler realized the condition was neither a dementia, nor did it always occur in young people (praecox meaning early) and so gave the condition the purportedly less stigmatising but still controversial name from the Greek roots schizein (σχίζειν, "to split") and phrēn, phren- (φρήν, φρεν-, "mind"). Bleuler treated celebrated Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky after his breakdown in 1919, following a meeting with him and seeing that he showed signs of violence and excessive babbling.

Bleuler coined the New Latin word autismus (English translation autism) in 1910 as he was defining symptoms of schizophrenia, deriving it from the Greek word autos (αὐτός, meaning self).^[5] According to the Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis by Charles Rycroft, it was Bleuler who introduced the term ambivalence (in 1911).

Bleuler is also recognized today for having a neurological condition called synesthesia, in which information from the sensory systems crosses over with the result that an individual experiences one sensation as another – tasting colours, hearing numbers or seeing music, for example.

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