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Abstract:
The kraepelinian conception which still prevails in contemporary psychiatry no longer allows us to express all the diversity of observed mental disorders. Moreover, some classical resistances and innovations had foreshadowed the necessity of its renewal. Nowadays the quantitative studies using statistics and the computer, as well as the application of scientific theories to the qualitative aspect of disorders have until now failed in improving the situation. However the theory of communication, cybernetic, the general system theory have shown the possibility of seeing mental disorders as dysfunction of systems. Likewise a new method of operatory observation has permitted to result in an integrated system of permanently open functional models. Moreover the transformations of the disorders among some patients lead to evoke the abstract notion of psychopathologic continuum. The latter allows to view mental pathology, no longer as syndromes and entities, but as functional disorders of a same psychodynamic whole. Consequently, the disorders are the evidence of dysregulations of various mental organizations and the result of a dysfunction in the integration of the latter. Their expression in terms of integrated functional models better shows their diversity, polymorphism, and mobility. What is at stake in such a debate is not only theoretic but also practical and therapeutical.