Kurt Schneider

Kurt Schneider (1887 to 1967) was a German psychiatrist best known for his work on how schizophrenia and the then-called psychopathic personalities are diagnosed and understood. Born in Crailsheim in Wurttemberg, he trained in psychiatry in Cologne, served on the Western Front in the First World War, and was mentored by the philosopher Max Scheler, whose theory of emotions shaped his first major publications. In 1931 he became director of the German Psychiatric Research Institute in Munich, which Emil Kraepelin had founded, and he left it, according to his biography, out of disgust at Nazi psychiatric eugenics. After the war he became Dean of the Medical School at Heidelberg University and stayed until retiring in 1955. He championed diagnosis by the form rather than the content of a symptom and listed the psychotic symptoms now called Schneiderian first-rank symptoms, whose diagnostic reliability has since been questioned. With Karl Jaspers he is credited with founding the Heidelberg school of psychiatry.