[Historical perspectives of child psychiatric research in the tension field between natural and psychological sciences].
Child and juvenile psychiatry first came to be regarded as an independent clinical field after the second world war. Up to that time, research had been concerned with confirming the findings of adult psychiatry among children and juveniles. From the time of Kraepelin, adult psychiatry had made an effort to establish an immediate relationship between pathological anatomical findings and psychopathology based on close observation of the individual. In contrast to this were efforts to overcome subjectivity by using statistics or by defining "types" (Kretschmer), which led to the concept of syndromes. In the field of child and juvenile psychiatry, this doctrine brought to the fore the study of the consequences of low-level brain damage during early childhood in the 1950's. In research in both adult and child and juveniles psychiatry there is a constant alternation between a more organic and a more psychically oriented approach to observation. But there is a fundamental limit to any effort to objectify psychic phenomena, one that is mirrored in microphysics and related borderline areas. Individual case study and statistical, mathematical methods must be used to supplement one another. One main area for future research in child and juvenile psychiatry relates to the application of the insights of developmental psychology to general psychopathology and how to integrate related fields from the social sciences. Child and juvenile psychiatry cannot be limited to "psychiatry" in the narrower sense of the term, either in clinical practice or in research.
Lempp
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D000293:Adolescent; D000296:Adolescent Psychiatry / Q000266:history*; D002648:Child; D002665:Child Psychiatry / Q000266:history*; D005858:Germany; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D012106:Research; D013038:Specialization / Q000266:history
Die historische Perspektive kinderpsychiatrischer Forschung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Natur- und Geisteswissenschaft.