Psychiatry, Philosophy, and the Problem of Description

Abstract

Philosophy and psychiatry seem, at first sight, to be totally different fields in which different people at different sites do different things using different methods on different levels of abstraction pursuing different aims. So one might wonder why psychiatry, being part of medicine, has always had a special affinity to philosophy. This can be answered historically as well as systematically. Since psychiatry has been established as a field of medicine, psychiatric literature is and has always been full of philosophical thought and direct reference to philosophy. Psychiatrists have been sometimes warned not to disregard philosophy which can be shown by quoting Jaspers who wrote that everybody inclined to eliminate or disregard philosophy will be overwhelmed by philosophy in an unpercieved way (Jaspers 1973, pp. 643--644).2 The benefits of philosophical reasoning within psychiatry are expressed in a more recent publication on truth in psychiatry by Wallace (1988, p. 146): ``So what good is philosophy to psychiatrists anyway?…at the very least it keeps us intellectually honest, humble, logical, selfcritical, and yet questing for knowledge and influence.'' Furthermore, there are quite a few articles of the title ``philosophy and psychiatry'' and ``psychiatry and philosophy'' respectively, although scattered with regard to time and place of publication and diverse with regard to content (cf. Blankenburg 1979, Edel 1974, Hönigswald 1929, Natanson 1963, Stransky 1923, Straus 1963).