Psychiatry between Psyche and Brain

Abstract

Since its development around 1800, psychiatry has been moving between the poles of the sciences and the humanities, being directed toward subjective experience on the one hand and toward the neural substrate on the other hand. Today, this dualism seems to be overcome by a naturalism which identifies subjective experience with neural processes—according to the slogan “mental disorders are brain diseases.” Psychiatry thus tends to isolate mental illnesses from the patients’ social relationships and to neglect subjectivity and intersubjectivity in their explanation. What should be searched for instead is a paradigm that can establish psychiatry as a relational medicine in an encompassing sense: as a science and practice of biological, psychological and social relations, and their disorders. Within such a paradigm, the brain may be grasped and researched as the central “relational organ” without reductionist implications.