Search for the Causes of Schizophrenia

H. HAFNER and W. F. GATTAZ Between 1891 and 1955, three founders of modern psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) and Kurt Schneider (1887-1967) lectured at the University of Heidelberg: Kraepelin for 12 years, Jaspers for over 25 years and Schneider for approximately 10 years. During this period they laid the foundations of descriptive psychopathology and modern classification and con­ tributed essentially to the development of our current thinking on schizophrenia. In 1986, on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the University of Heidel­ berg, we held a symposium in memory of these three giants of psychiatry for which we chose the title Search for the Causes of Schizophrenia. It was jointly organized by the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim and the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Heidelberg. The intention was to meet one of the major challenges of current psychiatric research, namely the fact that since Kraepelin's masterly description of Dementia praecox (1894) and E. Bleuler's slightly different definition of schizophrenia (1911), we have made only insufficient advances in clarifying the aetiology of this frequent and still often dis­ abling mental disease.