Lino's story: psychopathology from the perspective of phenomenology and existentialism

Abstract

From the 1950s-60s onwards in Europe, initiatives for a rupture with the existing hegemonic psychiatric model were established, consolidating an antithesis to the psychiatrizing logic, which can be characterized as a critical psychopathology. Thereby, some psychiatrists began to adopt a comprehensive attitude towards psychic illness instead of searching for causalities, understanding suffering as the result of the construction of a personality. The research on which this article was based aimed at a phenomenological and existential understanding of Lino's psychopathology, an adult man diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. The life-history method was applied, several interviews were conducted for data collection, and narrative analysis was used to prepare results and discussions. In the analyses, a process of division of the being was found, forged by contradictory sociological forces, which were the basis of Lino's psychopathology. In this sense, the beginning of madness may be considered as a break with the subject's network of concrete and significant symbolic relationships and the consequent loss of his sense of reality. Therefore, thinking psychopathology from a critical perspective implies understanding subjects in their relationships as a whole, with the appropriation of mediations they do throughout their biography.