Abstract
Objective: To demonstrate that we need philosophy to clarify the ontology of psychiatry: i.e. that psychopathology, personality and relationship theories are all needed for a comprehensive and critical understanding. That a reliable epistomology needs to deal with 3 realities: the outside world of physical reality [the Umwelt]: the social reality of our fellows [the Mitwelt] and the reality of our inner world of the Self [the Eigenwelt] in interaction and integration. That one needs to conceptualize the Self and its Objects embedded in Culture on all levels from the very start of birth. That Consciousness (and Self-consciousness) are essential for the functioning of the Mind (as if evolution should not have created it, we should have invented it) while the Unconscious is only a derivative and partial explanation. To show that human nature and the Perfectibility of Man provides the potential and also sets the limits of coping (competence) also the vulnerability to psychopathology.
Methods: Psychopathology and Psychiatry must be formulated with the above considerations in ‘Morphogenetic’ terms, as the only conceptual system that can unify it. Nature is made of energy-structures: Culture of Information and communication structure arising and embedded in natures energy structures: it is organised on evolutions higher level. While Mind relies on meaning-though structures built both on energy and information. By ‘morphogentic’ we mean that phenomena emerge and evolve by ‘structural’ changes in nature (as well in culture and in the mind) which are their true ‘causes’. For example; the laws of behaviour and experience function within certain frameworks; although ‘functions’ by the laws of self-organisation form new structures in turn: the “form/function” dialectic. ‘Structure’ (here in psychopathology) is conceptualised as a combination of the effects of (biological) deficit, psychological defence and social deviation in the pathogenesis of symptoms, Self-organisation and the configuration of the situations. Only a multi-axial approach can assess and deal with such a complex adaptive system (C.A.S) in a comprehensive, critical and concise manner.
Results: For Homo-sapiens, adaption is not just responding but acting. Not just coping but creating. Not just existing but transforming it into culture. Not just experiencing but expressing and communicating it. Creativity is the par excellence characteristic of homo-sapiens and a crucial part of human coping. The creative process is also a way of fulfilling the longing or search for a new object or state of experience or existence.
Conclusion: We have the potential gifts to transcend our nature, culture and conditions with that creative competence. History (including Natural History) is a sequence of creative transformations of structures. After all, is not all therapy a creative transformation, not withstanding the dangers of destiny from both our genes and ecology.