Beyond Standard Diagnoses: Biosemiotics, Symbol Theory, and the Subjective Lifeworld in Neurology, Psychiatry, and Psychotherapy
Swiss Archives of Neurology Psychiatry and Psychotherapy June 18, 2026 Jürgen Kriz
Standard diagnostic categories like the ICD and DSM were created as a practical compromise between competing schools in psychiatry, focusing on symptom patterns to improve reliability, communication, and reimbursement. However, this focus misses the complex bodily, personal, interpersonal, and cultural processes underlying human suffering. The article argues that beneath efforts to address this gap lies a fundamental complementarity in human existence: the organismic–biological dimension, based on Jakob von Uexküll's biosemiotics of pre-linguistic meaning-attribution, and the symbolic–cultural dimension, from Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, involving socially shared symbol systems. Understanding psychopathology and therapy through both complementary perspectives can enrich clinical practice.