ABSTRACT
Thus far, our examination of voices has disregarded the most prominent contemporary set of narratives about the phenomenon—that of psychiatry and modern clinical psychology. The significance of these narratives is that they determine what happens to many people who hear voices. Psychiatry interprets these experiences in terms of psychopathology, a word which discloses the medical origins of psychiatry. According to Berrios (1991), the word first appeared in a translation of a German textbook of 1847 by the Austrian physician Feuchtersleben, who set out the principles of medical psychology. The word was slow to catch on in Britain, where medical explanations of mental diseases were subsumed under a number of headings, such as ‘mental science’, ‘mental pathology’, ‘psychological medicine’ or ‘mental physiology’. Some authorities (Lanteri-Laura, quoted in Berrios, 1991) have described two approaches to psychopathology at the end of the nineteenth century. Some used the term ‘pathological psychology’ to refer to that branch of psychology concerned with phenomena which arose from disturbances of normal mental processes in mental diseases. In contrast, psychological pathology, favoured by psychiatrists, regarded psychopathology as the study of abnormal mental phenomena which only occurred in mental disease. Berrios (1984) has used the terms ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ to describe these conflicting models.
