The article points out the currently progressing integration of psychology, medicine, and ethics. The origins of this process can be discovered in progressing from narrow conceptions of etiology of an illness which are related to one factor only, and of human behaviour to conceptions of multidimensional man. They can also be discovered in the tendency to make ethics a science by implying from the knowledge of human nature a justification for norms of human behaviour. The concept of mental health is (...) a symbol of the integration of these disciplines. A model of psychoanalytical ethics, based on the primary value of the mental health, has been used by the author in order to show some coincidence of moral values and scientific description of laws governing the mental development of man. (shrink)

The subject of the investigations presented in this article are the causes of historical shifting of the extensions of moral evaluations and psychiatric diagnoses. The current vagueness of the extensions of these categories of human behaviour is, on the hand, a result of the revision of too rigid assumptions concerning the criteria of psychic normalcy and pathology, and on the other, a source of extensive decomposition of the meaning of the central psychiatric and moral categories, and thus results in a (...) widespread arbitrariness of pronouncements. The characteristic trait of the growing trend to hold moral evaluations and psychiatric diagnoses coextensive is to be found, says the author, in two phenomena: in the occurrence of new psychiatric concepts, very remote from the traditional division into psychogenic and somatogenic impairments, in the criticism or psychiatry from the viewpoint of specific moral values and in the criticism of specific moral values from the viewpoint of psychiatry. A need is felt to establish a definition which will regulate the concept of sanity and in a completely new way and mark the boundary between moral evaluations and psychiatric diagnoses, returning in effect to the extensional exclusion of the procedures of moral evaluation and psychiatric labelling. (shrink)