In the period between about 1820 and about 1870 German psychiatry was born and reborn: fust as anthropologically orientated psychiatry and then as biomedical psychiatry. There has, to date, been virtually no systematic examination of the philosophical motives which determined these two conceptions of psychiatry. The aim of our study is to make up for this omission to the best of our ability. The work is aimed at a very diverse readership: in the first place historians of science (psychiatry, medicine, psychology, physiology) and psychiatrists (psychologists, physicians) with an interest in...