Culture and Psychopathology: Contributions of the Philosophical and Clinic Phenomenologies

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the relationship between psychopathology and culture through the lenses of philosophical phenomenology, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and clinical phenomenology, by Arthur Tatossian. As examples of cross-cultural research in Brazil, we highlight two investigations: the first attempted to explore the theme of schizophrenia in Brazil and Chile, while the second was held to study the depression phenomenon in Brazil, Chile, and the USA. They both used the phenomenological perspective, inspired by the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, as a methodological tool. We understand the notion of culture through the ambiguous relationship between man and the world. In this perspective, we can realize the lack of pure autonomy or freedom, since choices are always tied to culture and to others with whom we live. It is in this sense that we can think with a more critical look at cultural psychopathology while Tatossian undertakes a critical perspective avoiding constant determinisms, dichotomies, and excessive oversimplification on culture and psychopathology issues. One exists only in mutual constitution with each other and with the world, on a culturally inherited basis. Nature and culture, man and the world, are ambiguous relationships, bodily situated, continuously expressed in an always conditioned and engaged freedom. Therefore, it is necessary to go beyond the symptom, comprehending the meanings of behaviors and the lived experience. There the disease is seen as the inability to make choices or even the consideration that such experience is the only possibility of the subject, characterizing, thus, a lived experience as psychopathological. We claim that cross-cultural studies show noted critical potential, that is often lost by a movement of ‘psychologizing’ culture, by psychologists who give priority to research that is restricted to measuring symptoms, merely to compare them between cultures. As a mental health constituent (and of sickening modes), culture must be addressed in a dimension covering its political, historical, social, anthropological, and ideological aspects, avoiding a naive look at the cultural phenomenon. Psychopathology should then be understood through a mental disease experience that will always be reciprocally incorporated with culture.

This chapter is part of the project Clinica Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity in the psychopatological lived world, coordinated by Virginia Moreira, CNPq 1D, Brazil.