On Psychiatry

For it is indeed quite remarkable how difficult it is to draw the right line between so-called normal life and mentally abnormal life. For example, it is difficult to say whether a person is mentally normal in the case of an event that occurred not too long ago in Basel, not far from here, in which a man left a large sum of money in his will for someone to lock themselves away in complete solitude until they had succeeded in truly proving the immortality of the soul. This was the will of a man in Basel, and I don't know what happened to it. I believe the heirs objected to it and tried to decide – not psychiatrically, but legally – to what extent it was related to psychiatry. But if you now really, each and every one of you, set out to examine whether it should be assessed psychiatrically or whether it is a mental illness or whether it is really an exaggerated religiosity or whatever, you will hardly be able to manage in full accuracy.