ABSTRACT
The development of psychiatry and the direction and progress of such a clinical science may be due to the influence of many variable factors. Although Chinese traditional medicine has been developed over the past 3000 years and was already documented in written medical texts as early as 200 BC, psychiatry as a medical subfield was not recognised, nor did psychiatrists exist as medical specialists. An attempt will be made, nevertheless, to describe some of the observed characteristics of Chinese psychiatry. In the 1950s, the direction of Chinese psychiatry was very much under the influence of Russian psychiatry. A standard Russian psychiatric textbook in the 1950s was used as the basic reference text, and Pavlov's conditioned reflex and higher nervous activity theories were frequently utilised as the theoretical framework. In psychiatric orientation, the influence of Russian psychiatry began to fade, and the thoughts of various psychiatric schools such as descriptive psychiatry and psychobiology began to reappear in the textbooks.
