summary Nowadays psychiatry is dominated by the scientific perspective of biological psychiatry according to which a psychiatrist should be first and foremost a brain specialist with a biomedical approach to patients and their problems. This constitutes a threat to the fundamental notion that a psychiatrist is concerned primarily with the workings of the mind and it reduces the discipline to a form of behavioural neurology. This restrictive interpretation fails to do justice to the theory that psychopathology has a multitude of causes. This article provides an overview of the methodological, socio-cultural and metaphysical causes and effects of this one-sided development. The overview is followed by a plea for a pluralistic rather than a deterministic view of psychiatry, which is an extraordinary type of medical discipline.