The understanding of human suffering, especially in its mental form, has been historically marked by theoretical deviations, reductionisms, and distortions that distance man from his social, independent, and creative nature. Within capitalist society, where everything tends to be fragmented, commodified, and appropriated as an instrument of control, the understanding of the human mind has not escaped this logic: Psychiatry and Psychology have become mouthpieces and enforcers of biologising or metaphysical explanations, concealing the true historical-social foundation of consciousness. Faced with this scenario of conceptual impasses, and the increasingly growing medicalisation and pathologisation of life, a radical reframing of the question is necessary—a return to the fundamental principle that the human mind does not exist in a vacuum, but reflects the concrete conditions in which man lives, acts, and struggles. The Juche Idea, created by President Kim Il Sung, offers for the first time a consistent scientific path to understand man and his consciousness and, from it, rethink this entire field on truly human and liberating foundations.
Psychopathology is the science dedicated to studying the pathological phenomena of the mind. It is an independent science, belonging neither to Psychiatry—which, in turn, is not a science in its own right like it, but a specialisation of Medicine—nor to Psychology. It began to emerge in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century and was actually consolidated in the 20th century with Karl Jaspers, who established the lasting foundations of this science, affirming its descriptive character and the underlying technical language.
Thus, Psychopathology is a science that studies the pathological phenomena of the mind by describing them in detail. This means it refrains from giving interpretations or theorising about them; it merely describes them as they appear, so that it enables understanding of how each of them manifests in life—their onset, development, prognosis, etc. However, although called upon to contribute to health, Psychopathology suffers from a problem, which is its great Achilles' heel: aetiology. Centuries have passed, and they have still not managed to determine the aetiology of "mental disorders"—that is, what actually causes them, unlike general pathology, which has this well clarified. Here, then, Psychiatry and Psychology come in with countless theories and explanatory systems that have emerged over time, become consolidated and remain to this day or perished in the mists of time, in attempts to give the definition of what "the mind" is and how and why it becomes ill. But none of these theories managed to give a satisfactory answer to this problem: either they distorted it into something purely biological, that is, a phenomenon constituted and governed by nothing other than natural laws, reducing man to a being driven by instincts or interior "impulses" and his illness, therefore, as merely a biological decay or defect; or into something mysterious and metaphysical, that is, something that is impossible to be understood and manipulated, preventing man from correctly understanding this fundamental part of himself and throwing him into fatalism.
The solution to this age-old problem came only with the proclamation of the great Juche Idea by President Kim Il Sung, who explained for the first time in history that man possesses a consciousness—which is formed from the reflection of the external world in his brain—that plays an important role in life by governing all his activities, elucidating in detail its characteristics and laws of development.
President Kim Il Sung said:
“Consciousness is the highest function of the brain, the most developed organ of the human body. The brain plays the central role in man's biological activities, and consciousness, which is its function, coordinates all of man's activities.”
By distorting human consciousness into something purely biological or metaphysical, Psychiatry and Psychology fail in their mission to serve the human being and serve only capitalism. The worldwide used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—organised by the American Psychiatric Association, a (lo and behold) private organisation in the USA—becomes, today, a great Frankenstein questioned by many people due to the growing number of "disorders" included in it, a fact that contrasts with that great insoluble problem mentioned earlier, which removes all legitimacy. Indeed, many critical voices from both sciences have questioned how they have been used in the service of the ruling classes as an effective means of silencing people by “pathologising” them—which means, in other words, inventing that there is a "disorder" in a person when in fact there is not, and thus medicating them and isolating them. In the end, Psychiatry and Psychology, like everything in capitalist society, have been used as tools of the exploiting class to paralyse people's independent consciousness, distance them from struggle, and gain their total submission. As President Kim Il Sung elucidates, without considering that human psychology reflects the external environment where the person lives and is constituted and the historical-social and class character that it acquires, it is impossible to understand it.
President Kim Il Sung said:
“The ideological consciousness of people is determined by the material conditions of social life […]”
Psychiatry and Psychology must abandon the views that reduce man to a purely biological being, or mystify him or distort him into an individualistic being, and adopt the correct view that he is a social being and is constituted not in a vacuum, but in a determined society, internalising all its socio-historical and class characteristics. By not doing so, they conceal the fact that it is decadent capitalist society that is the cause of all human problems, including mental ones, and unjustly blames the individual. Indeed, according to WHO data, no fewer than 1 billion people in the world (supposedly) suffer from mental disorders. If we do not have the concrete aetiology that determines mental illness, what is it that can be affirmed with such certainty and conviction? The vertiginous increase in the number of "mentally ill" cannot be understood as a simple matter of individual illness, who must go to the doctor and take medicine and go to the psychologist and undergo psychotherapy; but rather of a society increasingly sickened by capitalism, where he is born and develops. It is precisely the intensification of the contradictions of the capitalist system that has generated increasingly more ills in people's lives. According to the objective laws of the formation of consciousness clarified by President Kim Il Sung—especially the principle that human consciousness reflects concrete material conditions and can only come to develop and perform its guiding role fully under the correct social conditions—it becomes inevitable that the society based on exploitation, which prevents its full flourishing, be overcome. This is because capitalism, by deforming it with the imposition of an individualistic, antisocial, competitive, and fragmented way of life, in which the individual is compelled to live in permanent insecurity and alienation, enters into insoluble contradiction with man's demand to live and evolve in an independent and creative manner in a healthy social environment. The very nature of human development requires the historical overcoming of this system. However, it will never cede its place willingly, but will make frantic efforts to maintain itself—which is exactly what we see today and which has caused the most harm to man.
Only by perceiving this truth is it possible to remove the veil placed by bourgeois Psychiatry and Psychology to conceal the unhealthy and irrational reality of the capitalist system and endow the oppressed man with independent and class consciousness to carry out his struggle.
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