A critical comment on Thomas Fuchs’s Psychiatry as a Relational Medicine
Psicopatologia Fenomenológica Contemporânea September 13, 2025 Fabio Caprio Leite de Castro
Thomas Fuchs's book argues for an ecological-integrative paradigm in psychiatry, presenting it as a medicine of relation. Drawing on philosophy of mind, biology, psychology, and psychiatry, it integrates systemic theory, autopoiesis, enactivism, synergetics, and phenomenology. The analysis defends that psychiatric disorders are disorders of embedded subjectivity, arising from disruptions in self-understanding and interaction, explained through vertical and horizontal circular causality. This framework unifies the 5e cognition paradigm with systemic and phenomenological models, offering a coherent approach to understanding mental illness as relational rather than purely biological.