This chapter outlines the final set of revisions made to the Table of the Forms that were conducted between 1929 and 1932 and, for the most part, were negatively received by British medical circles. It accounts for the reaction it received by describing how competing schools of thought surrounding mental disorder during the interwar period contested to be the mainstream. These included the last generation of asylum doctors, who largely held hereditarian ideas, and a younger generation of doctors influenced by psychodynamic theory and psychoanalysis. This chapter will outline how established factions within British medicine did not regard classification and diagnosis as important due to an understanding of mental disorder as primarily as being a product of congenital weaknesses, the solution to which was prevention, containment and isolation from society. To satisfy these differences, the classifications committee produced a document that attempted to bring together many diverse theories of psychopathology, but this was ultimately the reason it attracted widespread criticism and scorn. These failed revisions spelled the end for the Table of the Forms, with there being little reference to it in medical literature after the initial hostile reaction to its publication in 1934.

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Amending a Melee of Contradictions: The 1934 Revisions to the Table of the Forms of Mental Disorder

  • Kevin Matthew Jones

摘要

This chapter outlines the final set of revisions made to the Table of the Forms that were conducted between 1929 and 1932 and, for the most part, were negatively received by British medical circles. It accounts for the reaction it received by describing how competing schools of thought surrounding mental disorder during the interwar period contested to be the mainstream. These included the last generation of asylum doctors, who largely held hereditarian ideas, and a younger generation of doctors influenced by psychodynamic theory and psychoanalysis. This chapter will outline how established factions within British medicine did not regard classification and diagnosis as important due to an understanding of mental disorder as primarily as being a product of congenital weaknesses, the solution to which was prevention, containment and isolation from society. To satisfy these differences, the classifications committee produced a document that attempted to bring together many diverse theories of psychopathology, but this was ultimately the reason it attracted widespread criticism and scorn. These failed revisions spelled the end for the Table of the Forms, with there being little reference to it in medical literature after the initial hostile reaction to its publication in 1934.