[In favor of a scientific psychiatry. Attempted formalization and operative model]

In giving due consideration to the heterogeneous nature of psychiatry, and its several trends with their inability rightly to state the many varieties of mental disorders, we may well ask whether this department of knowledge may not now be directed into strictly scientific channels. In the present state of things, the conditions suitable for the research of a scientific modus operandi are now fulfilled. That it may be placed on a more scientific footing, psychiatry must not only be able to overcome the epistemological obstacles and take into account the latest elements brought in by contemporary epistemology; it must also give us modes and patterns brought forth from clinical experience and experimentation. Constant exchanges between scientifically critical and purely clinical data is leading us to a pattern or mode of increasingly generalised scope which is based on functional notions and which permits us to answer the question raised in the affirmative.