The British Journal of Psychiatry (1971) 118: 7-10. doi: 10.1192/bjp.118.542.7
© 1971 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
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Body-Mind Problems from an Empirical Point of View

P. POLONIO 1

1 Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

If we look open-eyed at the illnesses of our patients in their whole length and breadth, we see how very imperfect are all our schemata of description and classification. However we arrange the material, the patterns are incomplete and there is much left over which will not fit into them; rearrange the patterns, envisage new ones, again the fit is incomplete and residues from the old schematizations are left unplaced. The truth is that a thorough-going empirical rationalist approach does not support any consistent treatment of body-mind problems. All the theories which claim to explain human psychopathology, whether they are constitutional, psychoanalytic or social, though they lend so much in the way of mediaeval charm to psychiatry, are little if at all better than the ancient doctrines of the humours.

Despite the best intentions of psychiatrists, both specialist and generalist, the psychotherapies and the somatic therapies remain frozen in mutual antagonism and mutual exclusiveness. The time has come when psychiatrists should rescue psychiatry from the all-pervading pre-rational thinking by which it is dominated, and place it on a solid wholly empirical basis. Rid of their preconceptions, both the psychotherapies and the somatic therapies will meet at last on common ground, on which it will be possible to unite their forces in the service of the patient.

Submitted on December 11, 1969




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