The Epistemology of Psychiatry and Mental Symptoms: The Cambridge View

As a discipline purporting to construct predicting narratives about a nebulous sub-domain of objects and phenomena, Psychiatry has since its inception depended for its pabulum upon an even-handed combination of empirical and philosophical research. When this balance is lost, as what seems to be happening at the moment, psychiatry becomes less productive and unable to offer an integrated approach to patient care. De facto if not de jure this unbalance is likely to have been caused by the re-emergence in the cultures of the West (and hence within Psychiatry) of the tired Positivist view that ‘empirical’ research is the only source of psychiatric knowledge and that the Philosophy of Psychiatry plays a merely ancillary role, that is, be the obedient interpreter, which merely serves to justify the claims made by the natural sciences. It will be argued in this chapter that such a view embodies a mistaken definition of psychiatry and is detrimental to clinical practice. The only way out of this potentially perilous situation is to undertake a thorough historical and philosophical re-analysis of Psychiatry.