Germán E. Berrios y Rogelio Luque, Epistemología de la psiquiatría: Madrid, Triacastela, 2024, 610 pp.

Abstract

Psychiatry is a discipline whose object of study borders on the humanities and the natural sciences. Its most basic unit of analysis, the mental symptom, is composed of both a biological and a semantic element. This characteristic necessitates a solid epistemological foundation for psychiatry, one that accounts for the complex variables influencing its study. In particular, the work of Berrios and Luque is characterized by its rejection of biological reductionism, while simultaneously relying on the study of the historical background and the moral, social, and aesthetic criteria that influence this field of study. Epistemología de la psiquiatría is a work that synthesizes and integrates the extensive scientific output of the Cambridge Psychopathology Group, which, under the leadership of Professor Berrios, has contributed for several years an original conceptualization of mental illnesses and their philosophical underpinnings.