Classic Text No. 136 ‘On the question of unitary psychosis’,by Harry Marcuse (1926)

Abstract

In his article ‘On the question of unitary psychosis’ (1926), Harry Marcuse (1876–1931) undertook a thought experiment in which he challenged clinical psychiatrists to entertain the possibility that the concept of unitary psychosis could be a useful diagnostic and nosological tool. Drawing on the psychology of Friedrich Jodl (1849–1914) and contemporary notions of energeticism, Marcuse proposed a non-empirical, ‘analytic’ method of overcoming growing dissatisfaction with Kraepelinian categories in the 1910s and 1920s.