[Modern criticism of psychiatry -- rebellion or return to tradition? (author's transl)].

Modern criticism of psychiatry started about 10 years ago with violent attacks on the ways in which psychiatric patients were handled in practice. In its attempt to shatter rigid structures and to adopt attitudes, wellknown for many years, for therapeutic action, this criticism remains in an historical scientific tradition which can be traced back to the beginning of this century. With the advance of sociologic thinking and the adoption of radical sociogenetic demands, mainly in the Anglo-Saxon literature, this criticism finds its own feet towards the end of the sixties as a kind of antipsychiatry. It obtains its leverage in the lack of differentiation between diagnosis and psychopathologic description in psychiatry ignoring like Birnbaum the "essential" history of psychiatric science dating from the middle of the 19th century, it returns to the psychiatry of late romanticism. It assesses the place of psychiatry within the range of sciences. In a similar manner it opposes the detached, individual-psychologic, approach or classical psychopathology and sees the various psychopathologic data as forms of a deviation in the sense of symbolic interactionism. Modern criticism of psychiatry could, therefore, mark the start of a developing interactional psychopathology which would certainly not have to compete with traditional psychopathology. It could take its place as an independent approach on equal terms with existing trends. A precondition would be a disnissal of a- and antihistoric basic tendencies which alone would make possible the necessary re-interpretation with the developments up to date and with present-day achievements.