[From Kraepelin to the system of the Association for Methodology and Documentation in Psychiatry (AMDP)]

Proceeding on the assumption that the AMDP system represents a standardization of the language of clinical observation, a language uniting the objective and the subjective or better, the observed and the experienced, the difference is demonstrated between the situation of today's researcher in the presence of such a language and the situation of Kraepelin for whom the significance of the words employed in describing an ill person was not challenged yet. It is emphasized that Kraepelin, founder of an etiological nosology in psychiatry, tried to develop another point of view, that of a pathophysiology surpassing his original and monocausal conception of psychic troubles. In the present situation this pathophysiological aspect in psychiatry is realized only in its first elements in the psychophysiology of psychic troubles. The investigation of some results of psychophysiological research in schizophrenia and depressive illness shows us that something non-specific from the nosological point Of view can provide us with the base of such a pathophysiology of psychic troubles, a proposition expressed by Kraepelin already in 1905.