Elena V. Kosilova Philosophical grounds of the Understanding Psychiatry (Published in Russian in 2018) Psychiatry has two faces. On the one hand, it is a natural science, close to physiology, and to biology through it, studying brain dysfunctions in mental disorders and the ways of pharmacological treatment of them. The human factor, so to say, is minimal here, and currently psychiatry seems to turn this face to us. And its other face is psychological. It demands the psychiatrist’s participation, the sympathy towards the patient, which is necessary at least for the diagnosis. There is no X-ray apparatus in psychiatry that could provide a mechanical algorithmic diagnostics. The judgment about patient’s state requires at least minimal understanding of what is going on from the psychiatrist. Jaspers in the beginning of 20th century distinguished between understanding and explaining psychiatry. He showed that, in the realm of mental disorders, there are the psychological bindings that can be understood, not merely described [Jaspers, 1997]. Since then the method of understanding of psychological phenomena and their bindings is used by phenomenological psychiatry. What is meant here is not only diagnostics. The question is what the experience of the mentally ill person is, what his/her inner state is and how far the comprehension of the sane observer can go. Psychiatry develops like a pendulum. In the end of the 19th century, the physiological approach dominated, then after the works of Bleuler and Jaspers the psychological one came forward [Vlasova, 2007]. After the discovery of the first drugs and other interventions (lobotomy among them), in the middle of the 20th century, the physiological approaches took the lead again and were displaced in the sixties by the psychological ones. The existential-phenomenological psychiatry emerged, after the works of L. Binswanger and R. Laing [Binswanger, 1999, Laing, 1995]. When the drugs that allowed the effective treatment of acute psychoses had been discovered, the physiological approach took the lead again, supported by modern methods of computer tomography and genetic researches. In recent times, the comprehending (or understanding) psychiatry emerged again and began to play a noticeable role in psychiatric investigations [Mundt, 2005, Pienkos, Sass, 2017]. All this was about Western trends in the development of psychiatry. Unfortunately, Russian psychiatry lags behind. Physiological approach dominates almost completely in Russia. Very few journals are published. In fact, the papers concerning the understanding approach in psychiatry may be found only in the Independent Psychiatric Journal. It appears that Russian psychiatry must pay attention to its psychological side. Without understanding of mental phenomena psychiatry turns into a heartless machine, reproducing diagnoses and mechanically distributing drugs. Not everything is well with the understanding psychiatry in the West. Although there are journals dedicated almost completely to it, e.g. Psychopathology, the papers published there are often far from true phenomenology and showing true understanding. A great part of them pays its attention to different scales and their correlations between each other [Minor, 2018, Nordgaard, Parnas, 2014]. Tests and scales are, of course, a necessary part of psychological investigation, but a true phenomenological approach implies the attention to each unique person, and it is a work of understanding between the psychiatrist and the patient face-to-face. Statistics always standardizes the differences and turns to the illusion of understanding. Furthermore, the found correlations are often trivial. The statistical trend is unavoidable in all sciences that are somehow linked to biology, and not only in them. There are almost no cases, no stories of single patients in psychiatric handbooks and books and in journals. One cannot see the trees for the forest. Without statistical methods, the paper does not seem to be “scientific”. However, each patient is unique. The psychiatrist is not to treat an average schizophrenic, but a unique person with a unique form of schizophrenia. Again, the exception is our Independent Psychiatric Journal, where the clinical