Psychiatry is useful only when it is honest and truthful to the mind of those who need it. To approach this conundrum, the author has come up with a keyword, "fusion of autonomy and continuum." What I mean by autonomy is the illnesses whose etiology has been clearly delineated, and by continuum I mean the disorders whose pathophysiology is known but etiology is unknown, or in other words, syndrome. Despite the fact that we do not know what causes most of psychiatric disorders, we have long classified them as schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness and so forth as if they were disease entities. In response to this, it has become more and more customary to diagnose in an operational manner and stop at the level of typological classification.
 The author has had a longstanding interest in "atypical psychosis," which is among the core elements of acute psychoses. "Atypical psychosis"represents diseases whose signs that might have a direct relevance to etiology have been overlooked and ultimately whose position in nosology as an independent diagnostic entity has been overthrown due to the introduction of operational diagnosis. On the other hand, its clinical features and specificity surpasses those of other conditions in terms of their proximity to the discovery of etiology. In other words, "atypical psychosis" is situated on the verge of making it out of the typological classification. The author has discussed the realization of psychiatry that reaches out to the mind by following the track of the pathology of atypical psychosis.
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