José María Álvarez (dir.)
Barcelona: Xoroi Edicions, 2023
[Automatic translation from Spanish]:
The spirit of the times or background noise in which the Vocabulary of Psychopathology (published by Xoroi Editions, 2023) has been written, could well be represented by El Roto in one of his cartoons; for example, in which he draws an academic with a shelf full of books behind him and a dictionary in his hands, telling us:
We are emptying the words of any meaning so that you can speak freely.
The Vocabulary of Psychopathology presented here goes in the opposite direction to the desertification that El Roto describes for us, because although words create and deconstruct realities, in the case at hand, it is the listening and study of clinical reality that creates a constellation of words: a vocabulary based on the semiology of classical psychiatry, psychoanalytic pathogenesis —«articulation between clinical manifestations and the psychic mechanisms that shape them»—, and the art and craft of treating the vicissitudes of the human condition through transference and words. Which are not few, because the human condition is to be conditioned by language and desire, with the consequent subjective division and being in default. The human being is conditioned and therefore suffers. Suffering is one and its ways of expressing it are multiple; and in each way there is a subject responsible for its suffering and its remedies. This is what this Vocabulary of Psychopathology is about: about the pathos of the human condition and its ethos.
The general emptying that El Roto speaks of, in the particularity of our psychological work, takes on the dimension of plunder, since the hegemonic taxonomy has been emptied twice: of the accumulated knowledge about[…]
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