De Waardt - Mending Minds

ISBN
   

Soort boek
Hardcover

The psychiatric discipline has often been a battlefield of contrasting opinions about the<br />essence of the human mind and the ways to treat mental disorder. Universities are the<br />place where new members of the profession are initiated and are therefore the pre-<br />eminent arena to fight out these conflicts. In Dutch academic psychiatry such clashes<br />easily escalated into public rows. This sharpness was not only caused by the intenseness<br />of these differences of opinion but also by the wish of the professors of psychiatry to<br />present their discipline as a set of serious medical concepts and effective therapeutic<br />directions. These views were however closely tied up with cultural developments of a<br />more general nature, as a result of which their professional quarrels tended to get out of<br />hand. Despite all these theoretical differences there was much continuity on the clinical<br />shop-floor.