On Psychiatry

It is of course no longer possible to talk about this topic, which would require an exhaustive treatment if one wanted to go into it at all, in any other way than with a few hints at most, because the study of psychiatry, especially in our time, certainly requires the most far-reaching reforms. If we consider how it is actually impossible today to formulate the right questions that need to be asked in psychiatry, we will realize how necessary such a reform of psychiatric studies is. However, such a reform will not be able to take place – for me, this seemed to emerge from Dr. Husemann's lecture itself – unless spiritual science first truly enriches the individual specialist sciences. For the development that Dr. Husemann has so beautifully described today, which began around the time of Galileo and culminated in the 19th century, has actually driven the whole of human thought life apart into two sharply opposing currents of thought. On the one hand, there are the ideas we have about material things and their processes; on the other hand, there is the life of thought itself, which, I would say, has increasingly taken on a purely abstract character. So that, since abstractions cannot be forces in the world, and therefore cannot be forces in man either, which bring about something, there is also no possibility for man to understand the material, the physical, from the soul, to build some kind of bridge from the psychic to the material.