[Neuropsychiatry today (author's transl)].

Neurology and psychiatry are combined in the easily misunderstandable term "Neuropsychiatry" as equal ranking sister disciplines. Neurology with its rectilinear development and the gain in important auxiliary methods enjoys general high respect. It is quite different with psychiatry. It is tainted with the events of the National Socialist domination. Its logical therapeutic methods are associated with inhumanity. Etiology and pathogenesis of the "endogenous" psychoses are still veiled in darkness. This gap in knowledge, detrimental to the prestige of psychiatry, is filled with theories, hypotheses and speculations. An extensively popularized psychology questions some concepts of a classical psychiatry wrongly described as conservative. Such uncertainty is alive even in the ranks of psychiatrists, to the detriment of their responsibility. Psychiatry must serve the care of the individual patient, renouncing all possible temptations. Some success can be expected from the "out-patient services" but this demands professional knowledge and critical ability besides activity.