[Grammar] THE psychoses

[willie-boy]

Hi all,

I would really like to know, why 'the' is used so often before the term 'psychoses' - even in such cases in which the term does not seem to refer to some already known or defined psychoses?

Here is a couple of examples from an article:
"First, there are the general histories of psychiatry that make only brief mention of psychosis or the psychoses as one part of the whole subject of psychiatry."

"For Feuchtersleben, the psychoses contained the four traditional categories of melancholia, mania, dementia, and idiocy."

An example from a book presentation:
"Karl Leonhard’s "Classification of Endogenous Psychoses” is based on sophisticated clinical descriptions and characteristical symptom patterns occurring during the long-term course of psychiatric diseases. A diagnosis can be made only if all the clinical features fit, i.e. a special diagnosis may not be made if one characteristic symptom is lacking. This is the main and important difference between Leonhard’s classification and the operational diagnostic systems that require the presence of some but not all specific symptoms of a symptom cluster. Leonhard took over the essential features since the early days of Psychiatry and found, always based on own live-long case studies, that the endogenous psychoses have to be divided into five main nosological different groups: on the one side the prognostically favourable unipolar affective psychoses, bipolar affective psychoses and cycloid psychoses and on the other side the prognostically unfavourable unsystematic and systematic schizophrenias."

Thank you for your time!

 

[probus]

I think we use the because, in the kind of writing you are talking about, psychoses are a recognized category. There is no need to stick to psychological matters, but to do so, we tend to say the emotions, as if we knew what a complete list of emotions would consist of. We do not, of course, but we feel comfortable with the idea of emotions as a category, and therefore we feel free to use the definite article.

 

[willie-boy]

I think we use the because, in the kind of writing you are talking about, psychoses are a recognized category. There is no need to stick to psychological matters, but to do so, we tend to say the emotions, as if we knew what a complete list of emotions would consist of. We do not, of course, but we feel comfortable with the idea of emotions as a category, and therefore we feel free to use the definite article.

Thank you very much! Case solved.