www.crossingdialogues.com/journal.htm DIALOGUES Crossing Dialogues Association 50 Schizophrenia, experience and culture OCTAVIO DOMONT DE SERPA JR. EROTILDES MARIA LEAL Institute of Psychiatry of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPUB/UFRJ), Brasil email: domserpa@gmail.com DIAL PHIL MENT NEURO SCI 2010; 3(2): 50-51 The work of Professor Kraus (2010) is more than welcome at a time in which Psychopathology has become increasingly shallow and lacking in density, content with the role of an ideal "observer" whose only ambition is an objective description of signs and symptoms in order to fulfi l operational criteria which reliably bestow a place for the case under observation within the grid of diagnostic classifi cation. As a critic of this approach to Psychopathology, which he refers to as symptomatological-criteriological (2003), Kraus offers us a living illustration of a Psychopathology which, instead of discarding Subjectivity, makes it the primary interest. The contribution of Professor Kraus is inserted within the context of AnthropologicalPhenomenological Psycho-pathology (2003), whose object of study is phenomena, rather than a compilation of symptoms. The phenomena manifest an experiential form of the patient, understood as a particular means of relating with oneself, with alterity and with the world. Here the experiencing subject, taken in his totality, occupies a central position. We deal here with particular ways of being-in -the-world. The experiential consistency of the pathos and the subjectivity of the lived, are here prioritised as fundamental clinical elements. Subjectivity is understood as fundamentally referring to, and open to, alterity and to the world, embodied, in the sense of emerging from the relation of a particular type of organism in interaction with the environment in which it lives, being, as such, embedded in its world. The phenomenological approach to the psycho-pathology of schizophrenia has been renewed over the last twenty years, not only from a return to the classic authors of philosophical phenomenology Husserl, Heidegger, MerleauPonty and psychiatric phenomenology Minkowski , Binswanger, Blankenburg but also from an effort to form a dialogue between the phenomenological perspective and the contemporary debate of the cognitive and neural sciences (Parnas & Bovet, 1991; Gallagher, 2004; Stanghelinni, 2004; Sass & Parnas, 2006). These studies have in common the search for the possible structural conditions of the schizophrenic experience taken in their prerefl exive and ante-predicative aspects, the fl ow of consciousness which has yet to be reached by the refl exive network (Schutz, 1970). However, these studies seem to have some diffi culty in answering what Gallagher (2004) called the "problem of selectivity": how to understand that the hallucinating voices and delusional ideas present specifi c and regular content articulated with the subject's biography and culture. In other words, how to articulate the pre-refl exive experiential subject (fi rst-person perspective), with the narrative subject (which integrates second and third-person perspectives) articulated in language, autobiographical and historicized (Zahavi, 2005). This is a question which has been investigated not only by psychopathology researchers, but also by researchers of anthropological medicine, such as Good (1994) and Corin (2004), interested in understanding the experience of illness, understood as the articulation of body, experience and narrative, thus exploring the ways of relating culture and experience. We know that the lived experience always exceeds the descriptive and communicative possibilities of the narratives. On the other hand, we also recognise that the narrative resources, more than simply expressing, can modify the immediate "livedness" of the experience, Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences DIAL PHIL MENT NEURO SCI 2010; 3(2): 50-51 Serpa & Leal 51 REFERENCES Corin E, Thara R, Padmavati R. À la recherche d'une texture dans les recherches interculturelles sur la schizophrénie. Contributions anthropologiques. Évol Psychiatr 2004;69:91-112. Gallagher S. Neurocognitive models of schizophrenia: A neurophenomenological critique. Psychopathology 2004;37:8-19. Good B. Medicine, rationality and experience. An anthropological perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. Kraus A. How can the phenomenological-anthropological approach contribute to diagnosis and classifi cation in psychiatry? In: Fulford B, Morris K, Sadler J, Stanghellini G. 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