Towards a Synthesis of Psychiatry and Semiotics

Recent biosemiotic research highlights the fact that "human individuation is (...) a double-tracked process, consisting in an incessant reconciliation or negotiation between the virtual reality that we have constructed in our minds and mind-independent reality as it impresses itself upon our lives. Human life cannot therefore be defined by its uniqueness as a particular genetic combination, but must instead be defined by its uniqueness as a temporal outcome of semiotic individuation." (Hoffmann, 2015)*
Semiotic individuation was at the core of Ernst Cassirer's "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" (1925/27/29)**. His unique approach to view 'symbolic formations' like magic, myth, religion, law, science, the arts and others as universal 'mediators' within the variable and developing levels of human worldmaking (which define the make-up of language and consciousness) was to philosophically anticipate the very idea which biosemiotic research is confirming today.
A synthesis of psycho/biosemiotics and Cassirer's symbol-theories can open up an entirely different approach to human interaction and consciousness, thus setting a different compass point for our theoretical attitude to psychopathology. This may help in opening up those hidden fundaments and secretly determining factors within the puzzling and contradictory phenomenology of psychiatric symptoms.

*Hoffmann, J (2015) Semiotic individuation and Ernst Cassirer's challenge. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 119: 607-615
** Cassirer, E (orig. 1923/27/29) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press (engl. transl. 1953/57)