S31.04 - Towards a cultural psychopathology

Abstract

The research we are striving to foster in Italy, aims at identifying the nature of the spaces linking the well-known neurobiological paths of interpersonal experience and the less-known psychological and phenomenological paths of the intercultural relation. The challenge consists in understanding the experience of plurality and therefore how you can pass from a “relational” to a “multicultural” mind.

An approach, to be really multicultural, intercultural and transcultural, must be based on the dialogue between different disciplines. Therefore, if European psychiatrists will not be opened to cultural anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, ethnologists, they will not progress and there will be the risk of closing themselves in a conclave detached from the interconnections of globalisation.

We hope that this first symposium between psychopathologists and cultural psychiatrists may prompt a debate between experts in the field of psychopathology and cultural anthropology to deconstruct Western culture seen as a repository of the “medical basic knowledge”.

Today, more than ever, it is increasingly important to consider not only the Western culture models (e.g. the neurobiological point of view) but also specific models of other cultures. The latter either disregard our medical background or they “do not let themselves be colonised”.

Those who work in the field of psychopathology are confronted to systems of thought different from the system of thought studied by Western psychopathologists. This makes to think that the right way to consider “psychopathology” is as a “cultural psychopathology”.