[Psychiatry and antipsychiatry. Future aspects of an unsettled controversy]

The quotation of two representative examples of so-called "antipsychiatry" shows that the given arguments are neither coherent nor of practical use. There is no doubt that antipsychiatry has not only utopian but also very down-to-earth aims in mind which could finally result in parts of psychiatry and, in particular, of psychotherapy being more or less split off from medicine. This can, in the long run, be avoided only if medicine not only makes an effort to continuously update its own theoretical foundations (which are included in the following key words), but more over investigates to what degree practical psychiatric research takes them into account. Difficulties in this context are shown.