Historical Origins of the Concept of Dissociative Schizophrenia and Psychotic Continuity

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder, characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized speech, disrupting one's ability of reality testing. Although the great authors such as Bleuler, Jung, Meyer etc. included this disorder in a conceptual framework associated with dissociation, in a significant part of the history of psychiatry, these two phenomena were seen as almost completely unrelated. However, contrary to the assumptions, the commonality between these two phenomena is far greater than is supposed. In order to be able to model the relationship between the concept of 'psychotic continuum', which is increasingly emphasized in recent years, and the concept of 'dissociative continuum', historical dissociative schizophrenia needs to be reconsidered. This article discusses the concept of dissociative schizophrenia held by important figures in the history of psychiatry, and provides an introduction to another article that contains today's reflections of this concept