Stressing the need to create rules with regard to the establishment of human behaviour, this study discusses the manner in which rules in Freudian psychoanalysis can be used as a form of treatment and as a theory of human development.

Recently, the predominance of natural sciences seems to have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the human sciences. Adopting a phenomenological and hermeneutical point of view, this book is intended to contribute towards a justification of the human sciences, taking account of quintessentially human characteristics. The basic assumption is that man interprets his own experience and the world around him, yielding to the limitations imposed by language. Central themes are intentionality and causality, desire and lack, responsibility and loss of responsibility. Relevant domains are psychopathology...

Psychiatry or psychopathology finds itself in a state of imbalance. The reason: the impossibility to unite biological and psychological factors. Effectively, this leads to the psychic reality being largely ignored. And yet psychiatry as a human science will have to acknowledge the psychic reality: the human capacity to symbolise reality. This book demonstrates that phenomenology, hermeneutics and Lacanian psychoanalysis support this view, whilst also drawing on Cassirer's theory of symbolization. In the domain of psychopathology, this convergence and the conceptual space it brings offer an...