History of Psychiatry and Critical Neuroscience

Psychiatry and brain research form an area of medicine and life sciences that is intertwined with society in a special way and aims at the human self-understanding. In dealing with mental alterity and in the various forms of exclusion of people with mental disorders, not only the inner state of society becomes apparent. The changing social conditions are also reflected in particularly dramatic transformations in the psychiatric field. Since the establishment of psychiatry as a specialized medical discipline in the 19th century, brain research has been regarded as the key to a scientifically based understanding of the specifically human abilities to feel, think and act. At the same time, however, these abilities remain embedded in contexts that are described and researched in particular by the humanities and social sciences. The resulting fields of tension are at the center of this topic.