Anthropology and psychiatry: from the objectivity of the ‘case’ to the experience of relationship and encounter with the person

Nearly, a century and a half ago, in the wake of the late Enlightenment, positivist thought, as opposed to the declining Romanticism, made possible the great flowering of experimental medicine along the lines of the natural sciences, but also allowed it to go into a suggestive reductivism, easily erected as a system.