10 Facts About Ernst Kretschmer

Ernst Kretschmer was a German psychiatrist who researched the human constitution and established a typology.

Ernst Kretschmer attended Cannstatt Gymnasium, one of the oldest Latin schools in Stuttgart area.

From 1946 until 1959, Ernst Kretschmer was the director of the psychiatric clinic of the University of Tubingen.

Ernst Kretschmer was the first to describe the persistent vegetative state which has been called Ernst Kretschmer's syndrome.

Ernst Kretschmer is known for developing a classification system that can be seen as one of the earliest exponents of a constitutional approach.

Ernst Kretschmer based his classification system on four main body-types:.

Ernst Kretschmer associated each of his body types with certain personality traits and, in a more extreme form, with different mental disorders.

Ernst Kretschmer wrote that there is only a weak relation between schizophrenia and pyknic body type on the one hand, and between Circulars and asthenics, athletics, and dysplastics on the other.

Ernst Kretschmer believed that pyknic persons were friendly, interpersonally dependent, and gregarious.

The essential characteristic of the asthenic type, in Ernst Kretschmer's words, is "a deficiency in thickness combined with an average unlessened length".