[Now-a-days positions in legal psychiatry (author's transl)]

The stimulus to this contribution to legal psychiatry has to be seen in the present state of the discussion of some of its premises. To be fully aware of the problem it seems necessary to go back to a very elementary point of view. Thus it becomes evident that there is epistemologically a fundamental difference between the so-called gnostic and the agnostic standpoint, between the psychoanalytical and the phenomenological approach. Furthermore a non-contradictory answer to the present questions only appears consistent with the "agnostic" method, whose formal implications are explained very shortly.