The symptom as lifeworld event: Toward a phenomenological anthropology of mental suffering

In contemporary psychiatry, the distinction between sign and symptom structures diagnostic reasoning by privileging observable indicators over subjective experience. This article revisits the concept of the symptom through a phenomenological and anthropological perspective that foregrounds its experiential and relational dimensions. Rather than treating symptoms primarily as clinical indicators or formations of the unconscious to be interpreted, the article conceptualizes them as events that transform the subject’s relation to the world. Drawing on phenomenology and medical anthropology, the article proposes a tripartite framework for understanding symptoms across three interrelated dimensions: situated suffering, corporeal event, and symptom-as-lifeworld. The analysis is grounded in long-term ethnographic research on mental health in Catalonia, Spain. The framework is explored through two cases: a young man diagnosed with depression whose experience unfolds as a progressive withdrawal from meaningful engagement with the world, and an artist diagnosed with schizophrenia whose symptoms generate an intensified symbolic field through which experience is reorganized. These cases reveal contrasting trajectories of symptomatic transformation described as world-detachment and world-generation. Reconceptualizing the symptom as a lifeworld event makes visible what biomedical and psychoanalytic approaches displace: the texture of the world that suffering transforms. • Symptoms reconceptualized as lifeworld events • Framework: situated suffering, corporeal event, symptom-as-lifeworld • World-detachment and world-generation as contrasting symptomatic modes