Utopie ed eterotopie del corpo: le allucinazioni agli albori della psichiatria

The work aims to identify and investigate some problematic philosophical questions, which arose in parallel with the constitution of psychiatry as a medical science. Therefore the thesis takes into consideration the theories that psychiatry expressed about a particular issue, the hallucinations and specifically its perceptual or psychic nature. This topic is a central one for psychiatry of the nineteenth and partly of the twentieth century. Several authors (Esquirol, Ev) of the so-called classical psychiatry (a science which tries to analyse madness as a mental illness) considered in fact hallucinations as diagnostically relevant elements. That had been possible since these phenomena were intrinsically ambiguous. If on the one hand in fact they could not be identified univocally, on the other they seemed to confirm or, on the contrary, confute the philosophical theories about the relation between man and its world (as to say the possibility of knowledge which this relation makes possible). The attempt to define hallucinations alternatively as perceptual alterations or psychic phenomena, highlighted the philosophical assumptions at the base of the theories on which these same definitions were founded. (theory of knowledge, of the conception of the body, of the mind, of the language) The work is divided in five sections, which consider: the distinction between illusions and hallucinations as defining moment of the psychiatric semiotics; the theories which interpret hallucinations as perceptual alterations; the theories which defined hallucinations as psychic issues; the mixed theories; the theories based on the model of aphasia, that overcomes the dichotomy between perceptual/psychic.