Existentialism and Present-Day Psychiatry Abroad

Abstract

The criticism and overcoming of various idealist distortions of the nature of mental diseases and of the scientific method in psychiatry certainly constitute most important prerequisites for the scientific materialist study of psychoses. Such a critique is impossible without determining the influence exercised by various trends in Western idealist philosophy and the reflection of this influence upon the views and directions of contemporary psychiatry abroad. Because of its specific features, psychiatry as a science has proved to be central to the ever more exacerbated struggle between materialism and materialist scholarship, on the one hand, and various idealist trends, open or concealed, on the other. Soviet psychiatrists are the authors of a number of works of critical analysis of the ideological and philosophical sources of various idealist trends in modern psychiatry abroad (1, and others). When, in this article, we return once again to the question of modern "existentialist psychiatry," it is for the following reasons.