The Subject of Psychopathology: Of What Plural Is It Made?

This paper argues for the theoretical importance of the notion of the subject for the current psychiatric and psychopathological fields. This notion has been underestimated in favor of descriptions based on subpersonal neural processes that discard it as a tributary of objectionable idealistic approaches on mental life research and as irrelevant from the theoretical and clinical point of view. To identify the theoretical problems that these descriptions necessarily entail, we conduct a critical reading of three authors from the neurosciences field who represents this perspective: John Taylor, Douglas Hofstadter, and Thomas Metzinger. Through a critical reading of their positions we seek to point out certain conceptual problems that compromise this non-self perspective. We then take phenomenology as an example of other theoretical descriptions of the subject that offer a non-idealistic and non-metaphysical perspective of subjective structuring. We then build the argument of why abolishing the notion of the subject means putting at risk one’s very ability to discern what is psychopathology.