The present work retrieves and analyses certain historical antecedents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to establish relationships between the psy-knowledges and the so-called 'social question' in Chile. An intimate link between the two fields, observable in health, education, criminology and housing issues, among others, is detected. These initiatives, in particular, were driven by the then-government responses to demands made to them by different sectors of society, including the Catholic Church, the liberals and the socialist workers. It is noted that the described relationships have a common denominator in a scientific discourse based on hygenism and that such relations were functional to the country's incipient industrialization. We conclude on the existence of an interface between the psyknowledge - psychiatry, mainly- and the new model of Chilean economic development, framed in the hygenism and emerging concern for the living conditions of the population.