La ricerca psichiatrica transculturale

Abstract

Through a historical excursus, the article depicts the main stages which have lead to the development of ethnopsychiatry and transcultural psychiatry, and wonders about the sense of these disciplines. The authors highlight contradictions and the weak points in the thoughts expressed by the main theoreticians who in turn have studied mental illnesses in non-Western populations. When studying depression in African people (black depression), the difficulties psychoanalysis and organicistic psychiatry have in identifying the etiopathogenesis of mental illness, regardless of patients’ cultural environment, become evident. The alternative to these limits stands in Massimo Fagioli’s theorization of the annulment pulsion as a universal non-conscious dynamic that is at the basis of mental illness.