Perspectivism and the methods of psychiatry

In their book, The Perspectives of Psychiatry, Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney propose four basic perspectives to undergird and inform the practice of psychiatry. These are the perspectives of diseases, dimensions, behaviors, and life stories. The authors redescribe these four perspectives in terms of their underlying "logics": law-governed causality, comparative and quantitative concepts, teleology, and narrative, respectively. After explicating the general nature of a psychiatric perspective, the authors show how such a perspectivism can resolve disputes concerning the different methods of psychiatry and how it can avoid the shortsightedness of sectarianism.