Delusions as “Wrong Beliefs”: A Conceptual History

TLDR

Historically, 19th‑century scholars linked delusions directly to insanity, a view later popularized by Jaspers, but the relationship remains confusing, especially for English‑speaking psychiatrists due to limited access to non‑English scholarship. The claim that Jaspers inaugurated the definitive view on delusions is misleading, as Chaslin had already established the key distinctions by 1912 and earlier attempts to separate delusions from pathological belief were largely ignored.

Abstract

It was a common view among 19th century historians and clinicians that the study of delusions was the study of insanity itself (Ball & Ritti, 1881). At the beginning of the 20th century, Jaspers rendered this insight into a cliche (Jaspers, 1963). The nature of the link between delusion and insanity, however, has continued to confuse scholars, particularly those writing in the English language (Ireland, 1885; Arthur, 1964; Moor & Tucker, 1979; Winters & Neale, 1983). German (Huber & Gross, 1977), French (Ey, 1950) and Spanish (Cabaleiro Goas, 1966) writers have fared better; unfortunately, much of their work remains inaccessible to English-speaking psychiatrists. This is one of the reasons why, in Anglo-Saxon psychiatry, it has been suggested that the ‘definitive‘ view on delusions started with Jaspers and the Heidelberg school (Hoenig, 1968). This suggestion is misleading (Berrios, 1991), for by 1912, when Chaslin published his great work on descriptive psychopathology, all the distinctions nowadays attributed to Jaspers had already been made. Indeed, the rare efforts made to escape from the ‘pathological belief view were ignored (Southard, 1916).