Symptom complexes: a useful research domain for psychiatry and philosophy?

Kahlbaum distinguished symptom complexes from the concept of disease, and he
systematized them. This aspect of history has not been enhanced, since the purpose
was to find diseases in a strict medical model. Kraepelin followed the search for
diseases and established the foundations of contemporary psychiatric classification. At
the end of his life, however, he questioned this goal and suggested a unitary approach
of symptom complexes distributed in stages, as prevailed before Kahlbaum. The real
meaning of symptom complexes in psychiatry was then questioned, even whether their
investigation should be independent from the notion of disease.
Hoche considered the search for disease entities as "hunting a ghost," suggesting that
the symptom complexes were already preformed in human organism. Such reasoning,
in accordance also with Bonhoeffer’s non-specific types of mental reactions, was
among the reasons leading Kraepelin to think that the search for disease entities could
have been an incorrectly placed problem. He speculates so far: "the insanity forms of
emotional and schizophrenic manifestations do not represent by themselves the
expression of certain disease processes, but only show the areas of our personality in
which they occur." Kraepelin anticipates the impact of Kretschmer’s known work, as
well as that of Carl Schneider, who considered the symptom complexes he investigated
for schizophrenia as originating from corresponding normal functions of mind or
Funktionsverbände.
According to Jaspers, the study of psychology would be to psychopathology as the
normal physiology to pathological physiology, without clear limits from one side to
another, and psychology would still not be able to offer the knowledge of "normal" that
psychopathology could take advantage. It is possible that the theory of symptom
complexes, which has been a tradition in psychiatry, could be useful in the investigation
of this relationship between psychopathology, person and mind.