Abstract
The notion of integration of the mind and the body, of the mental and the physical, is widely promoted in psychiatry. Descartes, for instance, is often held responsible for divisions that appear in our profession and our practice. The wish for integration, though, fails to recognize in which way the divisions might be fundamental in psychiatry. Thus thinkers who give voice to divisions tend to be shunned. This paper will attempt to trace the endeavour in Western thought to suture such divisions to philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. In reading Plato with Aristotle rather than against each other we can appreciate how Plato's Ideal and the notion of harmony in Aristotle are the early representatives of this integrative striving. It is only in examining the yet earlier thinkers, the so-called Pre-Socratics, that we can uncover the function of Plato's Ideal in its attempt to iron over the divisions that the Pre-Socratics were able to articulate. In particular Heidegger's reading of the Pre-Socratics allows us to grasp the radicalness of what was able to be put forward by some of these early thinkers. A reappraisal of the Pre-Socratics and the re-positioning of Plato and Aristotle which follows in this context are the means by which we might re-consider the place of the ongoing attempt to erase the division between cell and soul in the current juncture of the history of psychiatry.