Abstract

It is important for a field to occasionally take stock of where it is, which Annemarie Köhne has done with her exploration of different frames of thought on psychopathology currently in play. As an advocate for thinking of psychiatric constructs as practical kinds that are often calibrated to serve different, even competing purposes, I am in agreement with her concerns about relying on a one-size-fits-all model. Between her and I there are slight differences of emphasis with respect to essentialism and the role and scope of symptom-based descriptive psychopathology. In what follows I explicate these differences.Köhne competently elucidates how a categorical, disease-based model of disorder...