Since the 1980s Kraepelin has been seen as the ‘father’ of modern psychiatry. This is because a century earlier he pioneered a new approach to clinical practice in psychiatry, which attempted to delineate clear diagnostic classifications that would help map behavior to psychological dispositions to biology, among much else. But if we understand psychiatry and psychology – not to mention psychometrics and so on – more from the perspective of their research paradigms rather than clinical paradigms, then, as I show in the book, what Kraepelin did was essentially expand Galton’s paradigm, which had previously been restricted to cognitive ability (View Highlight)
From the perspective of capital, humans are isolated individuals who have sets of abilities and disabilities, relative to the norm, for each bodily mechanism, organ, system, and so on. What Galton did was generate the theoretical and methodological basis for naturalizing and reifying this. He used this to rank individual cognitive ability and in turn to attempt ranking the races, with wealthy white people at the top of his rankings and Black people at the bottom. My argument is that just as Galton’s paradigm was being widely adopted in psychology and psychometrics, Kraepelin also took that theoretical basis and suggested it should be expanded to what he called ‘mass psychiatry’, which would go far beyond just intelligence. Kraepelin wrote about how this could be used to determine fitness for anything from military service to what he thought of as mental degeneracy. Basically, through Galton, Kraepelin helped imagine the world we live in today. (View Highlight)