Ernst Kretschmer

Ernst Kretschmer (1888 to 1964) was a German psychiatrist who researched the human constitution and established a typology of physique and temperament. Born in Wüstenrot near Heilbronn, he studied theology, medicine and philosophy at Tübingen, Munich and Hamburg between 1906 and 1912, became assistant to Robert Gaupp in Tübingen in 1913 and took his habilitation in 1918. He directed the psychiatric clinic at Marburg University from 1926 and the clinic at Tübingen from 1946 to 1959. He classified people into four body types, asthenic, athletic, pyknic and dysplastic, and linked each with personality traits and, in extreme form, with mental disorders, associating stocky pyknic persons with sociability and manic-depressive illness and thin types with introversion; the article notes that this association of body type with personality is no longer influential in personality psychology. He was also the first to describe the persistent vegetative state, sometimes called Kretschmer syndrome, and described sensitive paranoia. After 1933 he supported the SS and signed the professors vow of allegiance to Hitler.