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Development as a Unifying Concept in Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Leon Eisenberg
Leon Eisenberg*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
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Extract

A quotation from Edward Mapother can serve admirably as text for this address: ‘In practically all properly investigated cases of insanity, it is found that it is the result of a summation of multiple causes, effective in combination, though inadequate singly. It is this that renders all controversy between extremists of the physiogenic and psychogenic schools so futile’ (Lewis, 1969, p 1359). In the same year, 1922, in his Salmon Lecture, Adolf Meyer said: ‘The overmechanization of psychiatry … (has) led to too much reliance on chemistry and physiology as curealls in mental ills, while psychoanalysis, by laying too much emphasis on the subconscious and sex, has lost sight of the … functions of the conscious mind and has … disregarded the fact that man is subject to physical … biological … and social laws' (Meyer, 1922).

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 131 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 225 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 1977 

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