also provoke a particular kind of aphasia: conduction aphasia. The confirmation of this theoretical prediction by later observations encouraged him to go beyond this and apply his concept to psychiatric disorders. He proposed that these disorders were related to abnormal conduction between different areas of the cortex. He postulated a disruption in the ”psychischen Reflexbogen“ (psychical reflex arc) that he named ”sejunction.“ However, schizophrenia had not yet been described at that time.2 The building up of the current nosologic category stemmed from the work of Emil Kraepelin at the turn of the 20th century.3 Otto Gross, a young physician, proposed that “dementia praecox” could be related to a sejunction problem, and coined the term “dementia sejunctiva.”4 Gross was working in the Burghôlzli at the time when Eugcn Blculcr was its director. He was influenced by the associationist view of Bleuler, who tried to identify the fundamental psychological disorder as a problem of the relationship between ideas or concepts: “der spaltung” (dissociation - however, this should not be confused with the notion of “dissociating disorder” as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DS.M]).5 According to the common view at that time, which considered that psychology was closely
