ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and psychiatry have lived alongside each other for more than a century, often under the same roof – marital partners whose divorce never quite happened. The impenetrable quality of madness has led to many speculative views on its origins: biological and genetic; psychologically uncontained traumatic experiences; and socially constructed family scapegoating and stigmatising of roles. The hospital’s solution was divisive to create schismatic groups. The functions were held by different people at different times and in different places. Despite the barrier effects, multidisciplinary team working had a place in the old institutionalised mental health hospitals. Roles and functions were prescribed by tradition, the psychiatrist with his team of nurses, psychologists, occupational therapists, etc. As care in the community has taken over from the old hospitals, that close, even rigid, integration has been steadily dismantled and the professions have separated themselves further from each other.
