[Schizophrenia in anthropology: nosological forms, nosographic positions, cultural paradigm]

By its central concept (Spaltung), the Bleulerian notion of schizophrenia is connected with the associationist psychology. It theorizes the apparent nonsense of psychotic symptoms. On the contrary, an anthropological approach theorizes as well the meaning of psychotic experience as the subversion it provides. Based on a network of symbols, culture shapes both the social life and the identity of everybody, but it rests on some arbitrariness which the psychotic experience denounces. In traditional cultures, several coherent nosographies are being described. They are used as "treatises on grammar", succeeding more or less in telling the functioning of the "nosological idiom". In our own culture, the concept of schizophrenia seems to allow a better understanding of our cultural setting than of the mental disease(s) to which it gave a name.