A brief survey is given of a number of developments in psychiatry over the past 20 years. The most important one is considered to be the introduction of the methods of the empirical sciences in psychiatry. Psychiatry is developing from a theoreticalspeculative discipline into a applied science. Slowly and gradually but steady. Psychiatry is flourishing even more richly than in Rnmke's time, but it has left the danger zone of uncontrolable growth of unverifiable theories.