Psychiatry as craft

A number of essays published in History of Psychiatry are examined which concern the general character of the historiography of psychiatry, and the professional relations between psychiatrist-historians and professional historians. An alternative is offered to the various positions advanced in these essays in which psychiatry is understood as a craft. This conception draws attention to ways in which psychiatric theory is acquired through clinical experience rather than text-based formal education. It is suggested that this creates difficulties of interpretation for the historian of psychiatry, but that these difficulties can be inappropriately exploited by critical historians, who rely on the ambiguity of psychiatric terms to argue that psychiatry has historically been a primarily normative and political enterprise, or at least an intellectually weak and professionally greedy one. A more tentative approach to the interpretation of textual sources from the history of psychiatry is suggested. This approach may lead to a less adversarial relationship between psychiatrist-historians and critical professional historians of psychiatry.