Epistemology of Psychiatry Between Applied Biological Sciences and Humanities

Within the last decades, psychiatry became a “Galilean” discipline following the example set by physics and chemistry. In misapprehension of the original semantics of biology which meant the science of the living, physicians and even psychiatrists referred to themselves as “Biologists” or “Biological Psychiatrists”, even though psychoses were considered as an expression of a deficiency of cerebral transmitter metabolism. By this semantic faux pas “Bios” and therewith all phenomena of the living were eliminated from psychiatry. A minority of psychiatrists became more and more aware that medicine and especially Psychiatry lacked a theoretical foundation. As evidence for that, one may cite demands, according to which psychiatry should be abolished as a discipline of itself and instead being integrated into a widespread integrative neuroscience. The present monograph counteracts such ambitions emphatically and tries to play a modest part in contributing to the badly needed development of a theoretical consciousness in psychiatry.