When the ground cannot be touch. An outline of modern culture, crisis of meaning of life and psychopathology

Abstract

After the devaluation of the traditional systems of axiological meaning in the Western world, one question arises: what meaning do people give to their daily lives and to the suffering that they felt in response to limit-situations? The aim of this article is to analyze the crisis of sense in the modern culture and its psychopathological implications. For it, the work is divided in four parts. The first part presents some of the cultural factors that have most influenced the current situation of crisis of sense. In the second part this crisis is described in terms of transit from living in a culture of the guilt to living in a culture of the anxiety and the uncertainty. In the third part we analyze the clinical consequences that this change has in subjectivity and the behavior. Finally, in the fourth part, different mechanisms to avoid the anxiety in response to the suffering and the lack of vital sense are discussed. We conclude that the lack of vital sense may be in common clinical base of numerous forms of mental dysfunction.