ON PSYCHIATRY AND SOULS: WALKER PERCY AND THE ONTOLOGICAL

Who of us L · not so strangely alone that it L · the cool clinical touch of the stranger that serves best to treat hL · loneliness?—Walker Percy The human body is the best picture of the human soul.—Ludwig Wittgenstein Psychiatry occupies a curious place among the medical disciplines. In most disciplines, specialists can behave as if (or at least pretend that) theirs is a specialty concerned with physiological mechanisms and facts: facts that may be difficult to uncover, for reasons to do with the patient's obstinance, self-deception, or ignorance, or even facts that may be mys-teriously influenced (physiologically) by the patient's state of mind; but facts that, nonetheless, can be explained and treated best within a frame-work that employs the language of medical biology. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, have no such luxury. Unlike the mechanisms of the body, human thought and behavior seem to resist analysis in purely biological terms. Of course, this has not deterred psy