Resumen

ENRIQUE LONDONO, Diego. The legitimization of psychiatric semeiology and its conjunction with the concepts of "normal" and "pathological": a vision during the Age of Revolution (18th-19th centuries). Rev. Asoc. Esp. Neuropsiq. [online]. 2014, vol.34, n.122, pp.337-351. ISSN 2340-2733.  https://dx.doi.org/10.4321/S0211-57352014000200007.

This paper will address an essential question: What is it that will give validity and legitimacy to the psychiatric semeiology? To answer this, initially we analyze the characteristics, rules and some of the issues for configuring semiological signs and clinical elements; next we take a look to what is understood by "normality" from the perspective of Georges Canguilehm. We then examine the history, and the philosophical and medical-psychiatric origins of semeiology during what is called the Age of Revolution. To continue, we leave the psychiatric field in order to take a glance of the field of rhetoric and oratory, and the categorizing and normalizing function of certain clinical signs related to language; then we come back to psychiatry and discuss how Michel Foucault conceived in an original way symptomatology and semeiology as a result of the concept of "instinct", the voluntary-involuntary axis and the influence of neurology in the mid 19th century. Finally, we analyze how the statistics and the eugenics played also an important role in the conceptualization of the norm and therefore the scientific discourse behind the established clinical signs.

Palabras clave : signs and symptoms; knowledge; normality; faculty; historical aspects; philosophy; rhetoric; instinct; statistics.

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