Entfremdung und Aneignung: zum Verhältnis von Sozialpsychiatrie und Sozialphilosophie

Setting out from the crisis facing social psychiatry in establishing itself as a science, an attempt is made to determine the autonomous epistemological place of social psychiatry: its subject is the mentally ill individual, who is viewed in the light of the methodological and anthropological features of experience with the forms of his vulnerability and self-alienation. Today the criterion for psychiatry’s status as a social science is the view that there is justification for an autonomous form of social therapy which differs from individual psychotherapy just as much as from organic somatic and psycho-pharmacotherapy. Its goal is to learn about the potentials for self-alienation which are worked through as mental illness in individual, institutional and social forms. Thus, social therapy also involves an autonomous ethic of social psychiatry which can be justified as an ethic of alterity, in the tradition of Hippocratic medicine as an ethic of care for others; this likewise reflects the politico-social framework for institutional transfer and an institutional psychotherapy.