EPA-0571 – Postnonclassical methodology in modern psychiatry and clinical psychology: opportunities and perspectives

Abstract

New evidence-based technologies, on the one hand, facilitate the work of specialists and validity of therapy methods, but on the other hand, these may create various obstacles in the doctor-patient relations and in considering the patient's personal needs (Mezzich, 2007). Hence, the issues of methodology come to the foreground of scientific endeavors in modern psychiatry and clinical psychology. Contemporary philosophical concepts allow us to distinguish the types of scientific rationality: classical, nonclassical, and postnonclassical (Styopin, 2003). These concepts may help assess the establishment, evolution, and further development of psychiatry and clinical psychology as well as determine theoretical and methodological principles of functioning and development of separate branches in psychiatry and psychology. The very essence of the contemporary paradigmatic shift in science lies in the fact that scientists have come to observe new objects for study - complex, open self-developing systems. The modern state of scientific knowledge and technologies and further perspectives of their development in the nearest future can be described by the notion of postnonclassical science (Prigogine, 1989; Styopin, 2003). The notion of person and his/her psyche as a complex self-developing system, imply a methodological scheme of research, congruous with the complexity of the object. Psychological syndrome analysis (Vygotsky-Luria school) as a system of principles for conducting a study and interpreting its results, comes in tune with epistemological multiplicity and complexity of the subject of clinical psychology and psychiatry, considered from the perspective of the postnonclassical academic view.