ABSTRACT
The changing scene of contemporary mental health provides a great opportunity to revive the controversial relationship of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Both the absolute number and the relative proportion of patients referred to acute psychiatric treatment has showed a tremendous rise. The trend started insidiously after World War II and became extremely widespread during the de-institutionalization era. Thereafter, this phenomenon led to relentless pressure on emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals and outpatient centers. Beyond medical and economic concern for individual treatment and specialized psychotherapy, the surge of such a new patient population calls for a renovated structure and enhanced operating efficiency of the mental health system as well as for a new service culture. Psychoanalysis and medical psychiatry have contemporarily emerged from the confluence of neurology and humanistic concern for the mentally ill into the common project of discriminating the symptoms of mental disease and the various figures of human misery and social exclusion.
