The hermeneutics of mental symptoms in the Cambridge School

Abstract

Current Psychiatry is in crisis. Decades of neuroscientific research have not yet delivered adequate explanations or treatments. One reason for this failure may be the wrongness of its central assumption, namely that mental symptoms and disorders are natural kinds. The Cambridge School has proposed that a new Epistemology must be constructed for Psychiatry, and that this should start with the development of a new model of mental symptom-formation. ‘Mental symptoms’ should be considered as hermeneutic co-constructions occurring in a intersubjective space created by the dialogue between sufferer and healer. Subjective experiences (caused either by neurobiological or psychosocial upheaval) penetrate the awareness of sufferers causing perplexity and/or distress. To understand, handle and communicate these experiences, sufferers proceed to configure them by means of templates borrowed from their own culture. Importantly, however, the same neurobiological information can be configured into different symptoms; and different neurobiological information into the same symptom. Therefore, ‘mental symptoms’ are dissimilar hybrid combinations of neurobiological and cultural information. To be ethical, therapeutic interventions must take into account such dissimilarities. Blind manipulation of the brain in all cases should be considered as counterproductive.