ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING OTHER MINDS Psychiatry differs from other branches of medicine insofar as it is concerned with patients whose affl iction cannot be reduced to pathologies of parts of an organism. The psychiatric patient always has to be regarded as a whole person. The mind and its disorders are special in that they affect the very characteristics that make us persons, in contrast to mere biological organisms: we think, we feel, we value, we want, we intend, we imagine, and so on. Another important aspect of these mental activities is that they are invisible to other people. This is a problem, of course, that has riddled psychiatry for a long time and that has deemed it unscientifi c in the eyes of some critics. We cannot ‘see’ a mental disorder in the same way that we can see or prove the existence of a somatic disease. Psychiatry has often strived to follow the precursor of somatic medicine in trying to identify bodily affl ictions that accompany mental disorder. But there are unsolvable problems for this approach, which have to do with the features of mental activities just mentioned. We simply cannot identify, say, the way a person feels by looking at the body, or the brain, for that matter. Although we know that the mind is somehow reliant on and related to the body, specifi cally brain processes, we cannot explain or understand complex mental activities by studying the functions of the nervous system. But to understand the human mind and its disorders is the very task of psychiatry. Hence, if somatisation of mental disorder does not work, there is a need to fi nd other ways to understand the minds of psychiatric patients.
