Psychiatry from Personalistic Attitude. Kurt Schneider

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show that the conceptual framework that reduces psychiatry to an empirical science, leaving philosophy aside, is clearly insufficient. For this purpose, the proposal of psychiatrist Kurt Schneider is recovered and compared with phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl or Max Scheler. The article focuses on the distinction between motive and cause, which is fundamental in the definition of neurosis and psychosis, and which is also the core of Husserl’s argumentation when he defends “personalistic attitude” as opposed to “naturalistic attitude”. KEYWORDS: psychosis, disease, Husserl, Scheler, Jaspers