Mending Minds

The psychiatric discipline has often been a battlefield of contrasting opinions about the
essence of the human mind and the ways to treat mental disorder. Universities are the
place where new members of the profession are initiated and are therefore the pre-
eminent arena to fight out these conflicts. In Dutch academic psychiatry such clashes
easily escalated into public rows. This sharpness was not only caused by the intenseness
of these differences of opinion but also by the wish of the professors of psychiatry to
present their discipline as a set of serious medical concepts and effective therapeutic
directions. These views were however closely tied up with cultural developments of a
more general nature, as a result of which their professional quarrels tended to get out of
hand. Despite all these theoretical differences there was much continuity on the clinical
shop-floor.