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In search for the structure of mental existence In 1894 philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey initiated a public debate when he accused the empirical research strategies of Psychology and Psychiatry of failing to grasp the structural content of mental existence. What was felt as blame in those days has grown to a matter of scandal as Dilthey's allegations still properly describe the state of clinical psychiatry and psychopathological approach - more than a hundred years later.This website reconstructs an interdisciplinary theoretical network beyond the Kraepeliean dichotomy, the focal concept of neurology and Freudian psychoanalysis, including Psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld, Neurologist Kurt Goldstein and Psychologist Kurt Lewin - all of them shifting the focus of clinical observation away from the brain, to the "Gestaltung" of inner tension and relational order between individual and environment/social field.
They all had been influenced by Ernst Cassirer's "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms", applying the ideas of constant change in mathematical perspectives and mental complexity to cultural development - and its pathological disorders. It was only the radical paradigm shift from the ´Euclidian Geometry' to the abstract worlds of the newly developed "Riemann´ Geometries" which allowed Einstein's and Maxwell's theories to emerge and modern mathematics to be developed.
Psychopathology - following Cassirer - is in urgent need of a comparable turn - beyond the narrow field of clinical observation towards a theory of "Mental Formation" - to categorize its underlying structural order, only from which a concept of mental illness can be deducted. This cooperation towards a "New Psychopathology" never entered mainstream psychiatry as all its stakeholders were driven into exile from Nazi-Germany.
This website revisits the concept of ´Symbolic Forms´ which emerge as magic, myth, language, religion, law, politics, science, the arts and others. They can be seen as "invariant patterns" of mental formation, which in their entirety create consciousness. A structural concept and a visualisation of its categorical order (MATRIX) is presented .
Psychiatric illness is always connected to a breakdown of "Symbolic Formation" as an artificial construct of culture. Its typical symptoms are not a mere lack of organic / psychological functioning - but derive from the inability to establish and to manage the complex relational order of 'meaning', while constantly changing its 'frames of reference'. Possible changes to the concepts of psychopathology are discussed.