Klaus Conrad

Klaus Conrad ( born June 19, 1905 in Reichenberg, † May 5, 1961 in Göttingen ) was a German neurologist and psychiatrist with important contributions to neuropsychology and psychopathology. He was most recently professor of psychiatry and neurology, director of the University Psychiatric Clinic in Göttingen since 1958.

Life

Klaus Conrad was born the son of the economist Otto Conrad in Reichenberg. When he was four years old, the family moved to Vienna. After attending the grammar school he decided after high school for medicine and put in Vienna in 1929 the state exam. A semester in London created a permanent connection to the Anglo-Saxon world; so won later Henry Head and John Hughlings Jackson an important impact on his scientific thinking. He started his way to the clinic in Vienna under Otto Pötzl (1877-1962), continued he to the Magdeburg mental hospital. After a period of study at the Salpêtrière in Paris, he came in 1933 to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, where he conducted research on the heritability of epilepsy. Already at that time he was steward of the NSD Federal. In 1939 he published in the Handbook of Genetic Biology contribution to the theme Erbkreis of epilepsy. In the same year he took Ernst Kretschmer as senior physician at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Marburg, and Conrad was a member of the Nazi Medical Association. In 1940 he became a member of the NSDAP. A year later, he had completed shortly before his call to serve as a military doctor a comprehensive monograph. Problem physique and character of the new aspects of Gestalt theory tackled

As head of a special hospital for brain injured Conrad disposal at the end of the war more than 800 carefully edited even cases with brain injuries, one of which had over 200 aphasic disorders that have been analyzed extensively for months. Again and again, Conrad found new methodological ways to track the Gestalt psychology laws of the various forms of aphasia, the impaired word finding and Alexie. In his structural analyzes brain pathological cases (1947-1949) he laid the foundation for a brain pathological informed general psychopathology on Gestalt theoretical basis.

1948 Klaus Conrad was appointed to the Saarland University to the newly created Department of Psychiatry and Neurology; In 1958 he became director of the University Psychiatric Clinic in Göttingen as successor Gottfried Ewald. In the same year, at the annual meeting of psychiatrists in Bad Nauheim, he proposed to abandon the nosological separation of schizophrenia and cyclothymia be final.

His major work is The incipient schizophrenia. Attempt to shape analysis of Madness (1958). The study describes the early stages of schizophrenia and rule- adherent typical schizophrenic patterns. From this monograph have been taken in the psychiatric parlance the terms " Trema ", " apophenia " and " Exceeded ".

Less than a year before his death appeared Symptomatic psychoses in the second volume of psychiatry of the present. Conrad was convinced that only by way of brain pathology access to the psychosis problem is possible, thus leading the phenomenological psychopathology to go back to the medical and scientific ground.

1961 should Conrad Director of the Munich Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry are, but he died before the start of the post.

His marriage to Martha Conrad four children ( Gisela, Bastian, Monica and Ursula ).