Abstract
This report considers the differences between the medical psychiatric
and the psychotherapeutic (in particular, the psychodynamic) approaches
to the diagnostics and treatment of mental disorders, and it describes a
generalized model of the psychotherapeutic process. It traces the
development of the relationship between the medical psychiatric and the
psychotherapeutic approaches, which has resulted in different models of
the interrelatedness of these paradigms in different countries (a
unified model encompassing both the psychiatric and the
psychotherapeutic approaches, and a model of two relatively independent
approaches). Examples are provided of the difficulties and
inconsistencies which have arisen from attempts to employ different
variants of the unified model that purports to unify the two different
approaches into a single whole. It is proposed that the medical
psychiatric and the psychotherapeutic approaches should each be
considered to have their own internal logic, independent from and
simultaneously complementary to that of the other, in accordance with
the principle of complementarity formulated by the physicist Niels Bohr
in quantum mechanics for the systematization of irreconcilable data
obtained by observers with differing perspectives. The author proposes
that each patient with a mental disorder should be examined
simultaneously and independently from the point of view of each of these
systems of coordinates (the medical psychiatric paradigm and the
psychotherapeutic paradigm).