Am J Psychiatry 1992; 149:858-866
Copyright © 1992 by American Psychiatric Association
The search: body, mind, and human purpose
DX Freedman
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA School of Medicine 90024-1759.
Psychiatry's appropriate agenda and severe distractions in sustaining it
are presently a concern and have historically been so as we struggle with
the issues of linking body, mind, and human purpose. Biology requires
behaving, variability, and the development of regulations to implement
"purpose" in coping with the milieu. Psychiatry begins and ends with our
patients--with their diseases and dysfunctions, their biographies and
aspirations--which, as a clinical medical science, we must systematically
study. Doing that, we will borrow from and pose problems for all the life
sciences. New knowledge about how cells and biological systems acquire,
code, and exchange information challenges all of medicine. In assessing our
advances and future, we consider the history of biological issues in
psychiatry and the "sins" of biologism or reductionism. We will see that
research questions and strategies in the current study of disease and
therapeutics have not fundamentally shifted from Freud and Meyer to modern
molecular neurobiology. The tension between the socially conditioned
purposive self and impersonal biological processes is an inescapable
intrinsic tension for psychiatry of which we must be cognizant as we
continue the search.
