Anthology of Venezuelan psychiatry.

Reception of Psychiatry in Venezuela since the 19th Century to the late 20th Century merits a historical approach. The following work proposes to research some of the very origins of Venezuelan psychiatry and its possible influence on contemporary mental health practice. Through documental research, the early works of local authors from the 19th Century through 20th Century finals: Carlos Arvelo, Lisandro Alvarado, Francisco Herrera Luque, Jose Luis Vethencourt and Jose Solanes, are subjected to study.

[Anthropology of curses].

The symbolic order offers a great number of opportunities for understanding man's greatest fears. Based on Lévi-Strauss' original concept, we can study the symbolic efficacy of curses and enrich it with the most recent contributions of neuroscience, philosophy, and the anthropology of consciousness. This is a report of qualitative research traversed by the methods of phenomenology and symbolic hermeneutics on a rarely addressed subject of unique significance to cultural psychiatry.

[ANTHROPOLOGY OF CURSES].

The symbolic order offers a great number of opportunities for understanding man's greatest fears. Based on Lévi-Strauss' original concept, we can study the symbolic efficacy of curses and enrich it with the most recent contributions of neuroscience, philosophy, and the anthropology of consciousness. This is a report of qualitative research traversed by the methods of phenomenology and symbolic hermeneutics on a rarely addressed subject of unique significance to cultural psychiatry.

[The cultural psychiatry in Latin America].

This paper presents only some of the most important contributions in the development of cultural psychiatry in Latin America. The continental efforts to understand the role that culture plays in the manifestation and treatment of mental disorders have been fruitful. The authors included are: Fernando Pagés of Argentina; Mario G.

[Anankastic phenomena in psychiatry (predestination and dace in mental life)].

The purpose of this communication is to compare behavioral mineralization occurring in mental illness to the freshness and plasticity behavior in health. The epistemological fundamentals of this paper include the theories of chaos and complexity of Edgar Morin, the concept of autopoiesis developed from the theory of systems, the latest discoveries on the neurobiology of consciousness and their associations with Darwinian psychiatry and also, following Lain Entralgo, recreating the Greek concept of ananke to describe the behavior fixation in an anachronistic place of the physis in mental illness. It provides some empirical evidence to support the proposal, and all this is rigorously examined with hermeneutic phenomenology and its theoretical possibilities.