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Although contemporary approaches to schizophrenia pinpoint 'disturbances of the self' as a central aetiological factor, historical insight into the link between accounts of schizophrenia and theories of subjectivity and self-consciousness is poor. This paper aims to overcome this gap by providing the outlines of a largely forgotten but crucial part of the intellectual history of schizophrenia. In particular, the impact of the German tradition of apperceptionism on nineteenth-century accounts of schizophrenia is unearthed. This tradition emerged from German Idealism, and culminated in Emil Kraepelin's account of dementia praecox. In addition to filling an important gap in the historiography of psychiatry, this analysis contributes to ongoing efforts to correct some common misunderstandings regarding Kraepelin's theoretical position.

In the wake of the critical reorientation in the historiography of psychology, a number of scholars challenged the one-sided structuralist and positivist interpretation of Wilhelm Wundt's work. This paper aims at contributing to these recent efforts, by providing an analysis of the way in which Wundt's apperceptionism conditioned his account of the relation between thought and speech, and by extrapolation, of disorganized thought and speech. While Wundt's pivotal role in the development of the psychology of language is relatively well-known, discussions on this part of his theorizing tend to focus exclusively on his gestural or motor account of language. This obliterates the complex theoretical background of Wundt's theory of language and speech, as well as its systematic place within his psychological system. Highlighting this neglected dimension of Wundt's theorizing, however, could open up a new horizon of pressing research questions in the historiography of psychology.

This paper takes Hermann von Helmholtz’s (1821 – 1894) psychophysiological theory of perception as a point of departure to examine the conditions of possibility for the process of objectification which necessarily mediates the interactions of complex living beings with their environment. By means of an analysis of the 1855 statement ‘to see is to understand sensation’, I will argue that the epistemological framework of Helmholtz’s optics can be analyzed transcendentally on two levels of analysis, namely critical and metacritical. Both levels are concerned with the way in which objectivity is constituted by an active, sensitive being, but while the former is concerned with the imposition of structure by our cognitive organization, the latter deals with the constitutional role of the (sensitivity) to constraint. It will be demonstrated how this general epistemological strategy could also help structuring the questions involved in accounting for the internal models that necessarily underlie the activity of anticipation. More specifically, I will argue that Helmholtz’s work could provide some powerful insights into the notion of ‘constraint’, which is considered to be crucial in accounting for the ability for anticipation according to Stepp and Turvey (2010), amongst others.