Psychiatric Nosology Revisited: At the Crossroads of Psychology and Medicine

This chapter addresses a great challenge for psychiatry as a medical discipline, namely, its hybrid disciplinary status. On one hand, it belongs to nomothetic and, on the other, explanatory domains of science although it is not properly identified with either of them – thus constituting the so-called explanatory gap. In effect, psychiatric diagnosis is characterized by a relatively high level of reliability and controversial claim to validity. In order to escape from a theoretical grounding, psychiatry has gradually adopted the neo-positivist stance of instrumental classifications. The rationale behind those systems is to operationalize conventions, guidelines, and criteria which combine in various ways a categorical approach with dimensional measures. In conclusion, prospects for the future development of psychiatric classification are discussed.