Language as Violence: Beyond the Immanence of Orthodox Psychiatry. On the Emergent Nature of the Symptom and the Transcendent in the Experience of Patient and Specialist

Abstract

The article offers a detailed critique of the epistemological foundations of orthodox psychiatry through the lens of an analysis of its language. The authors show how psychiatric discourse, being a closed immanent system, perpetrates symbolic violence against the patient by constructing a pathological identity and ignoring the patient’s unique ontology. Such an approach proves untenable when working with complex cases involving the aftermath of destructive social constructs, violence, or high comorbidity. As an alternative, the authors propose a functional-phenomenological approach that integrates ideas from R. D. Laing and Arnhild Lauveng, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and the principles of object-oriented ontology. Using a detailed clinical case, they demonstrate that productive symptomatology should be interpreted not as an internal illness, but as an emergent property of the “patient — environment” system and as an encoded existential message. Thus, clinical practice shifts from “treating the patient” to transforming the entire network of actors that generates “madness”. This requires the specialist to adopt the position of a “conscious solitary sailor” capable of working under conditions of epistemological uncertainty. The authors conclude that the future of psychiatry lies in creating conditions for the deconstruction of the old discourse and the development of new linguistic models that invite the patient to change the very structure of their being, rather than simply fitting them into the health/illness binary.