Semiotics of Symptom in Medicine and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The paper discusses the issueof expanding the concept of a symptom in medicine facinga number of “modern challenges” (from problems of reading symptoms to the growth of cases of psychosomatics), which require a greater complexity and flexibility of those semiotic models traditionally followed by doctors. Such an extension can be made more organic by referring to a genealogically close and at the same time rather original understanding of the symptom in psychoanalysis. The symptomsin both cases area kind of violation of the «habitual», to which both the person and the doctorpay attention. However, in medicine, thesymptom is understood as a problem arising from harm to health and the presence of pain. In psychoanalysis, the symptom must still be isolated from the subject’s speech, therefore the line of recognition runs not in the field of illness and health, but in the field of moral suffering, in which the emphasis is on the acceptable / unacceptable. It makes sense to expand the space of distortions and errors considered in medical semiotics: in addition to deliberate deception and accidental errors due to ignorance or inaccuracy, it would be worth adding, based on the hypothesis of the unconscious, two more types - unconscious deception and systematic unconscious error, including that characteristic of the doctors themselves due to countertransference.