Forensic psychiatry and the complexity of current psychiatric knowledge

Abstract

The present paper highlights the contributions to forensic psychiatry from general psychiatry, particularly in the difficult present situation, in which psychiatry tends to become increasingly quantitative and categorizing. The author examines a recent important book, Sottovoce agli psichiatri by Romolo Rossi, showing how it, considering both biological and somatic aspects and psychic ones, and basing itself upon a psychopathological-developmental theorization, founds a clinical approach that, even maintaining a psychoanalytical orientation, constitutes an important integration of multiple aspects and principles. Forensic psychiatry, too, should try to integrate both medical and psychological aspects, and specifically biological and psychoanalytical approaches, given that every clinical knowledge, even the most centered upon empirical data, is built upon and organized through narratives, based on abductive processes.