Klaus Conrad

Klaus Conrad (1905 to 1961) was a Sudeten German neurologist and psychiatrist, born in Reichenberg, who died in Göttingen. During the Second World War he conducted research on German soldiers who had been hospitalised with mental health symptoms on the Eastern Front, and he joined the Nazi Party in 1940. After the war he built a career as a professor of psychiatry and neurology and was director of the University Psychiatric Hospital in Göttingen from 1958 until his death. His main work, Die beginnende Schizophrenie, published in 1958 with the subtitle Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns, describes the early state of schizophrenia and its typical features, and it gave psychiatry the terms Trema, Apophänie (apophany) and Überstieg. Frank Fish reviewed the book in 1960 and used Conrad's approach in a neuropsychiatric case report the same year, and Aaron Mishara has argued that Conrad's work was an important contribution to neuropsychology and psychopathology; Mishara published an English summary of it in 2010.