La crise de la psychiatrie contemporaine 2ème partie: la reconquête du singulier

The first part of this article (PSN vol. 1, No 3 : 19–24) sets out to reveal the theoretical weakness and the practical constraints which burden present-day psychiatry, which is dominated by an excessive medicalization process in the absence of conceptions of normality and disease. In this second part, the authors reply to scientific reductionism purposing the development of a philosophical anthropology. A global approach to the human reality, which takes into account the biological, psychological, social and cultural dimensions, would enable a better understanding of the individual’s experience as well as of his dependence or autonomy on the environment. The individual’s different ways to experience social rules and values form the basis of “existential types” which will play different part in social and historical processes. Owing to biological and environmental factors, individuals prone to psychiatric disorders are unbendingly dominated by a single type of relationship to values: over-identification in manic-depressive disorders (“hypernomia”); weakness in schizophrenia (“hétéronomia”); under-identification in some personality disorders (“hyponomia”); and conflict in obsessive disorders (“idionomia”).