Psychiatric Ideologies and Institutions.

Abstract

This is the first serious and informed study of the implications of the functioning of the psychiatric hospital for psychiatric theory. The investigators have taken strategic advantage of a chance to study two widely different hospitals and three services of different ideology and practice in the larger hospital. The work is a collaborative one conducted with full knowledge of modern dynamic psychiatry and of ways of studying the institutional context. While the sociology of knowledge—the placing of human thought and understanding in its historical and social context—would seem to require that the investigators be in possession of all the knowledge they make the object of their study, in fact this can be handled either by dealing only with certain issues which repetitively arise and form a nucleus of attention or by dealing only with attitudes toward theory rather than the theoretical developments themselves. The authors have