Massimiliano Aragona, Ivana Marková
Key words: hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychopathology, epistemology
Psychiatry is in crisis. Its neopositivist basic assumptions, particularly the idea that mental symptoms are objective facts, are challenged. This article presents the Cambridge model about the construction of mental symptoms. Mental symptoms should be considered as hermeneutic co-constructions occurring in a social and cultural intersubjective space created by the dialogue between sufferer and healer. In this model, the same neurobiological information can be configured into different symptoms; and different neurobiological information into the same symptom. Finally, major consequences for current neuroscience research are discussed.
