[Who is Called "Schizophrenic"?]

Someone is called "schizophrenic" when suffering from a disorder described in 1911, for the first time by a Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in a book entitled "Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien". In this book, Bleuler proposes a two-faced approach: one centered on the disease, the other on the person. Bleuler's main contribution was to show the importance of the latter in the determinism of clinical pictures and illness course, thus opening the way to more anthropological approaches to the schizophrenic self. Taking these approaches into account, at a time when naturalistic models of the illness are prevailing, is far from being of no consequence, as far as the effectiveness of our therapeutic actions is at issue.