Abstract

It has often been emphasised that psychiatry is still an ‘expertise’ and has not yet reached the status of a science. Science calls for systematic, conceptual thinking which can be communicated to others. Only in so far as psychopathology does this can it claim to be regarded as a science. What in psychiatry is just expertise and art can never be accurately formulated and can at best be mutually sensed by another colleague. It is therefore hardly a matter for textbooks and we should not expect to find it there. This quotation indicates that Jaspers was immersed in a major debate in nineteenth century philosophy of science: the Methodenstreit. His dismissive comments about the ‘art’ of psychiatry set the ..