Although neuropsychology partly emerged from the work of psychiatrists, why have psychiatrists been excluded from neuropsychology? A historical observation and critical remarks

Neuropsychology, as a clinical and scientific field, has its historical foundationsdeeply rooted in psychiatry. Pioneering figures such as Clérambault,Ajuriaguerra, and Hécaen developed early models of brain-behavior correlationwithin explicitly psychopathological frameworks. However, over the pastdecades, psychiatrists have been increasingly excluded from the developmentand practice of neuropsychology. This marginalization is not merely academicbut reflects broader shifts in the medical and psychological sciences. Aspsychiatry was progressively reduced to a pharmacological and administrativediscipline, its cognitive and structural depth—essential for understandingcomplex syndromes involving both the psyche and the brain—was abandonedor delegated. Meanwhile, neuropsychology was absorbed either by clinicalpsychology or by neurologists, both of whom often lacked the synthetic,psychopathological perspective originally brought by psychiatrists. This paperexplores the historical, epistemological, and institutional reasons for thisdisplacement and argues for a reintegration of psychiatry into theneuropsychological field, particularly in areas involving behavioral and cognitivesyndromes of lesional origin.