Being a Member of the Bleuler Family
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/schbul/sbr135
ISSN1745-1701
Autores Tópico(s)Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern Formation
ResumoI didn’t know my grandfather, Eugen Bleuler (18571939), personally. He died a number of years before I was born. Everything I know about him was told to me by my father, Manfred Bleuler, Eugen’s eldest son. He not only told me, but he also wrote it down: every Christmas I would receive a new chapter about our family history. In that way, I got to know and to treasure my grandfather. Eugen Bleuler came from a long established Zollikon family. At that time, Zollikon was a rural community, more than an hour away from the city of Zurich. Today, ZollikonhasbecomepartofZurich.Fortwotothreecenturies, Eugen Bleuler’s forebears – and even his parents – lived modestly, as did most people in Zollikon. They earned their living partly from the land (wine-growing and livestock), and partly from processing silk. The city-dwellers used to buy the raw material and only they were allowed, right into the century before last, to sell on the produced silk. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the simple people living on the lakeshore too took an increasing interest in the developing sciences, and this was also the case for the Bleuler family. His parents lived most frugally so as to enable their children to have a good education. Furthermore, both families of Eugen Bleuler’s parents were actively involved in public life and regularly took on administrative positions in the Zollikon community. Only after their only daughter, Eugen’s sister, became ill, did their world start to become narrower. They were completely occupied with taking care of her. Up until 1830, when a liberal revival movement, under the influence of the French Revolution, began in Switzerland too, Zollikon was still dominated administratively by the city of Zurich. Until that time, third level education was hardly possible for citizens living in the country
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