Du rôle des techniques contemporaines sur l'évolution de la psychiatrie

The history of psychiatry comprises various levels of analysis. Confronted with the new technics (cybernetics and informatics) psychiatry has developped new trends, which the epistemologic and methodologic analysis, and the limits allow precision of the points of encounter and of divergence. Criteriology, which originates from informatics, intends to be pragmatic and atheoretic. In an objective way, it partitions the mental disturbances into items distributed among several axes, and in this way it accentuates the mecanistic character of the psychic functioning. It builds authority by trying to diminish the divergences among the classical Schools, thus facilitating communication and research, but it neglects the functional integration of the psychic system. Systemics, influenced by cybernetics, directs itself towards the totality of psychic functioning and removes all reductionism, favouring a constructivist conception of the disturbances in a network, giving priviledge to holism at the expense of the local determinisms. The systemal approach integrates cybernetics and informatics and considers the whole system as well as the local determinisms. It is based on the clinic, from which it tries to extract the great invariants, that permit a virtual reconstitution of the disturbances. It does this by means of logical-mathematical matrices, both holistic and categorical, which assure the validity and the progress of the systemal approach. A synoptic picture reuniting the salient traits of these trends exhibits their differences and concordances and shows the underlying structures at several levels of reality.