Farbod Fadai - University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences

Background and Aim : Wilhelm Griesinger in 1861 stated: If we only had an exact knowledge of brain, we would then know the psychic life and mental disorders, too. At the end of the 19th century, psychiatry tried to adapt to the model of experimental and natural science which ruled on the whole domain of medicine since 1850. So, psychiatry concentrated on searching the physical causes of mental disorders. But was this strategy successful Methods : The Psychiatric, neurologic, and Psychologic literature with respect to the organic causes of mental disorders were searched and read.Results : Since the year 1900, the early euphoria of somatic approach began to deteriorate. This approach did not present a satisfactory explanation for the majority of mental disorders and did not offer effective treatments as well. A knowledge of stagnation in scientific research, along with pessimism about the somatic therapeutic methods were spreading among the psychiatrists. Such was the atmosphere that directed Freud to an imaginative system-namely psycho-analysis-to explain and to treat mental disorders. When Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg began to work on his new system of psychopathology, faced the above- mentioned situations. According to Jaspers, a pure somatic approach was threatening the psychiatry, because this approach is accompanied with an hypothesis that the real fact of human experience is a somatic event, and if psyche is addressed it is a transient substitute which has no real scientific value.Conclusion : The above-mentioned view-point leads to an excessively hasty identification of morphologic or physiologic facts with mental experiences and in this procedure reaches to adventurous constructions that Jaspers addresses as brain mythologies . Afterwards the experimental scientific facts are clumsily re- formulated with indicating about psyche , individual , or mental illness , which means misplaced expansion of the physical world s domain of validity. But psychopathology, this brain child of Jaspers, is always facing this fact that man is the product of culture. The animals, too, may suffer from brain and neural disorders, but the mental disorders are specific to man. Medicine is only one of the roots of psychopathology. Psychopathology is not only a kind of biology, but is one of the humanities.

Brain, Psychiatric Disorders, Psychopathology, Jaspers