Paul Eugen Bleuler (
April 30, 1857 –
July 15, 1939) was a
Swiss psychiatrist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness and coining the term
schizophrenia.
Bleuler was born in
Zollikon, a small town near
Zurich in
Switzerland, to Johann Rudolf Bleuler, a wealthy farmer, and Pauline Bleuler-Bleuler. He studied
medicine in Zurich, and later studied in
Paris, London and
Munich after which he returned to Zurich to take a post as an intern at the
Burghölzli, a university hospital.
In
1886 Bleuler became the director of a psychiatric clinic at
Rheinau, a hospital located in an old monastery on an island in the
Rhine. Rheinau was noted at the time for being backward, and Bleuler set about improving conditions for the patients resident there.
Bleuler returned to the
Burghölzli in
1898 to be appointed director, where notably he employed
Carl Jung as an intern.
Bleuler is particularly notable for naming
schizophrenia, a disorder which was previously known as
dementia praecox. Bleuler realized the condition was neither a
dementia, nor did it always occur in young people (
praecox meaning early) and so gave the condition the purportedly less stigmatising but still controversial name from the
Greek roots
schizein (σχίζειν, "to split") and
phrēn,
phren- (φρήν, φρεν-, "
mind"). Bleuler treated celebrated
Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky after his breakdown in
1919.
Bleuler coined the
New Latin word
autismus (English translation
autism) in 1910 as he was defining symptoms of schizophrenia, deriving it from the
Greek word
autos (αὐτός, meaning
self). According to the
Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis by
Charles Rycroft, it was Bleuler who introduced the term
ambivalence (in 1911).
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