One hundred years of neuropsychology: Kurt Goldstein's seminal paper on the inherent complexity of symptoms.

One year after the German-American neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein had died, the Soviet-Russian neurologist Alexander R. Luria published a brief obituary-like article in which he praised Goldstein's 1925 lecture Das Symptom (The symptom) as the founding text of neuropsychology. Some reasons given by Luria for praising Goldstein's paper, however, seem unclear. The present contribution presents the core ideas of Goldstein's paper, and analyses in which way Luria may not have fully grasped its scope. In fact, Das Symptom looks rather like a founding lecture on how to convincingly understand neuropathological symptoms for the benefit, among other things, of neuropsychology, with implications even for present-day neuroscience.