Elements for a Phenomenology of Cultures: Cultural Existentials and the Dialectical Experiential Matrix

This paper proposes a critical expansion of phenomenological psychopathology of the individual to explicitly integrate the collective dimension. In order to accurately describe the scenario of collective life, and its relationship with the psychology and psychopathology of individual existences, we propose two moves: (1) A shift of focus from society (which denotes an organized aggregate of individuals) to culture (a transversal symbolic system, capable of extending beyond the boundaries of the original social group), since in the context of advanced globalization the conception of stable social aggregates has been replaced by models of fluid and changing “cultural flows”. (2) To phenomenologically describe these cultural flows that traverse the contemporary world, we introduce the concept of “cultural existentials” (time, space, body, and others) as a priori conditions of experience derived from the analysis of the fundamental structures of individual lifeworlds, as employed in phenomenology. These cultural existentials are integrated into a Dialectical Experiential Matrix (DEM), designed to overcome the reductionism of both structuralism and subjectivist individualism. The DEM frames the patient's experience as a dynamic interplay between individual freedom (the capacity for self-positioning) and cultural influence. An illustrative application analyzing the convergence between “pornographic culture” and the “homo œconomicus” anthropological type is provided to demonstrate how cultural existentials offer a collective model for specific narcissistic vulnerabilities and dysregulations of alterity, providing a crucial diagnostic device for the clinician.