Psychiatry is still living in Kraepelin's world. With this, studies on his writings are a-historical. The selective exegesis of the numerous editions of his book led to a rigid understanding of his contribution. But Kraepelin lived and wrote during an important period in European intellectual history and his writings can only be understood from this perspective. This article analyzes the development of his opinions in terms of the "program of studies" that he planned early in his life, the objective of which was to establish a stable description and classification of the psychoses. He eventually achieved this by longitudinally studying cohorts of patients using methodological criteria such as the course of psychosis and its incurability. In the case at hand, this methodology allowed him to use correlation to identify "clinical pictures" that both represented the "essence" of the disease and provided a taxonomic criterion. Although declaredly a-theoretical, Kraepelin (influenced by Kahlbaum and Wundt) thus managed to construct an empirical support for his Kantian categorization of the psychoses. A discussion on the cultural variables that forged these ideas is included here.
Mental Disorders; history, Mental Disorders; classification; Psychiatry; history, Emil Kraepelin