Main description:

Psychiatry or psychopathology finds itself in a state of imbalance. The reason: the impossibility to unite biological and psychological factors. Effectively, this leads to the psychic reality being largely ignored. And yet psychiatry as a human science will have to acknowledge the psychic reality: the human capacity to symbolise reality. This book demonstrates that phenomenology, hermeneutics and Lacanian psychoanalysis support this view, whilst also drawing on Cassirer's theory of symbolization. In the domain of psychopathology, this convergence and the conceptual space it brings offer an opportunity to create cross-fertilisation, enlarging the Lacanian clinical perspective. It will result in a philosophical conception of man as animal symbolicum, an animal fallen prey to language. In sum, the book renders a contribution to Lacanian psychopathology, to the philosophy of psychiatry and to philosophical anthropology. It is of interest to psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers alike.

Contents:

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I
The Medical Discourse: The Exclusion of Psychic Reality
The History of Hermeneutical Psychiatry
The Relationship between the Psychic and the Physical Reality
Empiricism in Psychiatry
Part II
Three Forms of Hermeneutics
Psychic Reality and the Symbolic Function in Triplicate
Three Psychopathological Structures and Nine Subject Positions
The Interpretation of a Life History
Epilogue
Appendix: Table Outlining Psychopathological Structures
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index