After long years of social isolation and indifference, the psychiatric patient is now a patient in a hospital or in a day-care unit, receiving specialized care that includes psychopharmacological treatment, protection, and socialprofessional rehabilitation opportunities. The very fact that the psychiatrist is “at the patient’s bedside” sanctions psychiatry as a branch of medicine, but also offers new dimensions to the understanding of the psychopathological phenomenon. Clinical activity can be regarded as a permanent source of information oriented towards a clinical methodology typical of psychiatry.