Psicopathology of language and Neuroscience today: a unifying perspective

The Psychopathology of Language as an academic discipline was born in 1987, the year in which the first course with this title was activated at the University of Messina, and has continued uninterruptedly to this day. Before then there had been a partial and non-specific interest both in the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries and in important pioneering studies such as those of E. Kraepelin (1899) on schizophasia, E. Tanzi (1889-90; Tanzi-Lugaro, 1914) and, more recently, Sebastiano Piro (1966), on the semantics of schizophrenics (a detailed history of these studies in Pennisi, 1998: §§.1-2; Jaccad, 2019; Dema, 2022). The psychopathology of language approach to psychiatry was intended to introduce the systematic study of pathological languages in mental disorders for theoretical, semiotic-diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Understanding and classifying – in short – through specific linguistic analysis techniques, but also treating mental distress through discursive interaction, the ontological reconstruction of cognitive and relational conflicts, not only with traditional psychoanalytic, anthropophenomenological or bergsonian psychiatry methods, but also with the current ones of cognitive psychology, linguistics and pragmatics. In the field of contemporary neurosciences, meanwhile, many research funds have been invested, worldwide, in the application of brain imaging technologies to language neuropathologies (aphasia, first of all) and in natural or induced neurodegenerative pathologies (as in the case of alcohol or drug abuse) involving, among other comorbidities, the partial loss of some linguistic and cognitive faculties (dementias and, above all, Alzheimer's disease). In these areas, the diagnostic capabilities, with research and the definition of reliable predictive biomarkers, and pharmacological or neurosurgical therapies, have demonstrated good efficacy, opening up promising prospects in the clinical field with both adults and children or adolescents. Much less positive results, both in theory and in application, have been obtained in neuroscientific research on mood and anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, those on the autistic spectrum and, above all, in major psychoses (schizophrenia and paranoia). In this context, the studies were more useful for a fair criticism of the narrowness of the diagnostic perspective of the DSM than for a real ability to understand the cognitive-ontological nature of mental disorders. Within this framework, the importance of the linguistic approach to mental illnesses seems, therefore, to remain essential. In particular, the phonetic/prosodic, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic analysis and the revisiting of the anthropophenomenological perspective may constitute a decisive support both for the neuroscientific hypotheses and for the pharmacological approach in a new framework of interdisciplinary psychiatry typical of the cognitive sciences.