Peters U H
Psychiatr Clin (Basel). 1983;16(2-4):103-8. doi: 10.1159/000283955.
Schizo-affective psychoses are neither schizophrenias nor affective psychoses. What makes them particular are the pathological changes in emotions. As has already been pointed out by Wernicke in 1900, virtually all changes in the patient's psychopathology are dependent on the actual degree of anxiety or other pathological emotions. But neither emotion nor even anxiety has ever been part of any psychiatric semiology. Although emotional psychoses--a term we would prefer instead of schizo-affective psychoses--are easy to diagnose, if the psychiatrist takes into consideration the pathology of emotions which we outline here, it seems unlikely that psychiatry is now more able to integrate these psychoses than it was 80 years ago. This can be put down to language problems, but there are also historical, symptomatical, methodological, and systematic reasons for it.