A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
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Wolf Langewitz
Abstract
This article investigates issues in psychosomatic medicine that could broadly be seen as concerned with the status of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ realms. Initially, it considers two seemingly opposing perspectives, the biomedical model and the constructivist/semiotic model. The bio-medical model has all the set-backs of a positivistic and deterministic model: there is an unambiguous reality that can be ascertained given a detailed enough analysis. It furthermore assumes that observations can be explained by the application of linear causal relationships between the single components of reality. The constructivist perspective and the semiotic way of thinking view life and individuals moving through their life as dealing with particular signs; by applying semiotic thinking we understand why certain elements were selected out of the environment and why they were given a specific meaning. It suggests that some of the difficulties arising from these models can be ameliorated with reference to the neo-phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz. In particular, the concept of the lived body (Leib) assists in understanding the relationship between a patient and his environment.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
