We analyze here the problems of the morbid heredity in the different editions of the work of Emil Kraepelin Clinical Psychiatry: a Text-book for students and physicians. We study the persistence and continuity of the main thesis of Kraepelin, included the hereditary etiology of mental pathologies, in the contemporary Psychiatry that is self-defined as Neo-kraepelinian. With this goal we study, firstly, the theoretical and conceptual articulations that exist between the idea of morbid constitution and the strategies proposed by Kraepelin for the realization of the psychiatric interviews. Next, we consider the place reserved to the studies of the morbid heredity in the historical context in which the Neo-Kraepelinian Psychiatry emerged, specifically since the elaboration of the DSM III.
Heredity; mental diseases; Kraepelin; DSM; degeneration