Approaches to Symbol and Symptom in Bodily Space‐time

The subject signifies in and through his/her body. He/she does it through culturally patterned bodily symbol and symptom. Symptom is evidence of a crack or break in the integral symbolic interweave, i.e., a break in the relationships that simultaneously mediate and differentiate between the subject's body and his/her being in the social, cultural, and natural world. The study of this symbolic interweave requires a multidisciplinary approach. First, approaches to the body considered as product stress the social and the cultural. Second, experience‐ and subject‐related research in Gestalt and psychoanalytic theories and in phenomenology shift the stress to the experience of the body, i.e., to the lived body. Third, divergent semiotic‐generative approaches (language‐derived nominalistic and hermeneutic investigations, metaphoric‐constructivist and praxiological approaches) consider aspects of the body drama, i.e., of the body's creative, signifying and symbolizing capacity seen in its own right. These approaches and their recent interdisciplinary developments hold the key to the elucidation of fundamental aspects of time and space that inform the socio‐cultural body symbolism and symptom formation. They also make possible innovative cross‐cultural investigations of the ways in which a culture may stimulate its bearers to choose a particular form of somatization, or abreaction.