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i'm gonna be using terminology appropriate for the first quarter of the 20th century, so excuse me if something comes off as offensive. at that time, his work seemed revolutionary, but in hindsight, it all stood on confirmation bias. example: he took a bunch of people with an asthenic/leptosome and athletic builds that suffered from schizoid personality disorder, and thus proclaimed that all skinny and fit people are prone to being schizoids and psychopaths (for athletic type - also epileptic). that they're generally asocial and antisocial. people with a physique described as pyknic ("rounded, chubby") were assigned severe mood swings and inclination towards developing mood disorders. described as more likely to be psychotic and commit voluntary manslaughter and other crimes of passion. irregular physique was called a dysplastic type, and even if it was intended to describe "unproportional" body types, everyone who didn't rigidly fit into the three types above was assigned that. described as combining any of the traits of other three types in varying degrees.

i fired up my old laptop to find and quote the book "fallanalyse und täterprofile" (hansen, musolff) ("case analyses and criminal profiling") where kretchmer's theory was thoroughly analyzed (among other pillars of criminology).

Die Schizophrenen, zu deren Hauptsymptomen unter anderem die Störung der Emotionalität gehört, er- weisen sich vorwiegend als Leptosome oder Athletiker. Schizophrenics, whose primary symptoms among others include emotional disturbances, tend to be predominantly leptosomic or athletic.

Psychische Eigenschaften diese Typs werden als ausgeglichen, schwerfällig, nicht nervös, aber zuweilen auch mit explosiv beschrieben. Athletiker erkranken häufiger an Epilepsie und Schizophrenie. Psychological traits of this type are described as balanced, slow paced, and calm, but on occasion explosive. People with the athletic body type are more prone to epilepsy and schizophrenia.

Manisch-depressive Patienten, charakterisiert durch Störung der Affektivität, zeigen in ihrem Körperbau vorwiegend pyknische Tendenzen. Manic-depressive patients, characterized by a disorderly affective conduct, appear to be of predominantly pyknic physique.

Dieser [dysplastiche] Typus stellt einen Sammelbegriff für eine Reihe von kleineren, unter sich sehr unähnlichen Gruppen von Körperbauvarianten dar, die nicht mit den ge- nannten Haupttypen korrelieren. Personen dieser Gruppe werden gelegentlich als auffallend oder unschön beschrieben. Es lassen sich aufgrund der Hetero- genität keine eindeutigen Zuordnungen zu bestimmten psychischen Merkmalen oder Störungen finden. Bei einer Charakterisierung muss jede Gruppe einzeln betrachtet werden, allgemein auffallend ist das bunte, unberechenbare und zu extremen Ausschlägen neigende Bild. This [dysplastic] type is a collective term for a number of smaller, dissimilar groups of body types that have no correlation with the aforementioned primary types. Individuals in this group are sometimes described as staggering or unattractive. Due to the varieties, no clear classification can be assigned to specific psychological characteristics or disorders. Each group must be considered individually for characterization; what is generally striking is their [...], unpredictable, and occasionally extremely wide variations.

and you know what's scary? for a long, and i mean long while this was one of the core things in criminology. then it was finally proclaimed to be pseudoscientific. and yet people still refer to kretchmer's bullshit work not even knowing any of the background or various crap that he came up with, just because it made its way into widely understood, bordering pop-cultural criminology. and though the theory about facial traits wasn't his, he was the one who laid the groundwork for it all.