Response to Strous et al.: A Focus on Kraepelin’s Clinical Research Methodology

Issues," Kraepelin proclaimed that "dreamers, poets, swindlers and Jews" possess "distinctly hysterical traits" and fall outside the bounds of normality, adding that Jews exhibit "frequent psychopathic disposition."These tendencies, he noted, are most importantly accompanied by "their harping criticism, their rhetorical and theatrical abilities, and their doggedness and determination" (4).Kraepelin also stated that "the preponderant influence of the Jewish spirit on German science, as is unfortunately wielded ever more intensely, appeared to me to be a serious danger" (5).Kraepelin was clearly guilty of profound boundary violations, allowing his clinical work and academic pursuits to be influenced by a right-wing socio-political agenda-an agenda that led psychiatrists, for the first time, to exterminate their patients during the Nazi era.This thinking began early on with his writings on "crime as a social disease"; with his attribution of criminal acts to "congenital inferior predisposition"; and with his membership in the nationalistic, extreme-right "Committee for the Rapid Subjugation of England" (4).His views later progressed to a multitude of statements regarding his dreams for a more authoritarian rule in his German fatherland, with Shepherd referring to his writings and lectures as displaying "disturbing overtones of proto-fascism" (4).Kraepelin was considered to be one of the foremost campaigners against homosexuality, stating that "homosexuality had to be fought prophylactically," and he suggested the age of consent be raised to protect young people from homosexuals (6), viewing homosexuality as a disturbance based on degeneration (7).Hence, he openly promulgated views of another psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, who coauthored The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life.Kraepelin believed that "reasonable policies of racial hygiene" (verstandige rassenhygiene) should serve as the solution to Germany's problems of "degeneration" (8), suggesting that cultural influences add to the decline and weakening of the "race."Kraepelin contributed fundamentally to the ideological basis of racial hygiene in Germany.Gaupp proclaimed that Kraepelin's work "comprised nothing less than the foundation of all Nazi racial hygiene laws" (9).Kraepelin is neither a generative forefather nor a great icon, as history looks at his views.Kraepelin may be the father of psychiatric eugenics; however, we dispute declaring him the forefather of a field dedicated to the ethical caring and management of long-suffering individuals striving to recover and reclaim meaningful roles and functions.