This is a doctrinal movement that seeks to analyze mental illness without reductionism and seeks to grasp the nearest as possible to the reality of the patient.

This is the analysis of an event, a concept, a feeling, trying to grasp as it is lived by the subject and in the direction you may have for him.

Review of literature.

It was the first approach to the knowledge of the pathological experience and was the first scientific model to characterize the mental pathology. It was the central doctrine of psychiatry until the end of World War II, when the hegemony of the German psychiatric science gave way to the views that are primarily developed in Anglo-Saxon countries (psychoanalysis and behavioral psychology), although some European countries such as Germany and Spain continued growing until the 1980s, when it culminated in the publication of the DSM-III (1980).

These approaches are “old fashioned” but are essential to understand and know the reality of human sick, “mentally ill man.”

The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.