The progress of modern psychiatry in the paths of biomedicine has led to the impression that psychopathology, as a science of human suffering in its various dimensions, would have become obsolete. A psychiatric nosology built exclusively on biological and experimental bases would take its place, definitely founding psychiatry as a medical specialty in its own right. This paper examines the dilemmas of that project to the reduction of the psychopathology into nosology and point some clues by which psychoanalytic theory of the subject and its pathos could provide the anthropological basis for the foundation of a psychopathology able to sustain psychiatric clinical practice.
psychopathology; psychiatric nosography; medical anthropology