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24 - Psychiatry without Description

from Section 8

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2020

By
Josef Parnas
Edited by
Kenneth S. Kendler ,
Josef Parnas  and
Peter Zachar
Kenneth S. Kendler
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University
Josef Parnas
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
Peter Zachar
Affiliation:
Auburn University, Montgomery
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Summary

This commentary on Peter Zachar’s chapter on the issue of description is concerned with the nature and role of description in contemporary psychiatry: It is argued that the so-called operational revolution entailed severe epistemological problems leading to a crisis of description, and hence a more general problem of classification and research. Language in psychiatry, unlike in somatic medicine, does not operate with fixed referential terms but is more concerned with meanings. In other words language in psychiatry plays an important constitutive role. Thus, a description derived from the medical model and transposed into psychiatry exerts devastating consequences, briefly illustrated by a few psychopathological examples.

Keywords

psychiatric descriptionlanguage experienceoperationalism
Type
Chapter
Information
Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
 , pp. 297 - 302
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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