Psychiatry emerged just over two hundred years ago as a special branch of medicine offering institutional care for the insane, since it encompassed the fields of medicine, natural history (biology) and philosophy (humanities). It appeared at a time marked by the transition with the exclusion apparatus of the marginalized people of the Old Regime and by epistemic pluralism. In this article, the contribution that psychiatry can make today - just over two centuries and some important conceptual and institutional rearrangements later - is discussed. It is well established in the academic world and socially legitimized, albeit at another moment of transition, in which new paradigms of care are established placing importance on the contextual and intersubjective situation of psychic distress. Redefining Pinelian intuition using contemporary vocabulary regarding the epistemological and ethical challenge of an area of knowledge and practice of care the scope of which is psychic distress, the thesis will be proposed that it is also necessary to articulate the planes of body, experience and narrative in an ongoing dialogue.
Psychiatry; Psychiatric reform; Body; Experience; Narrative
