Pornographic culture and erotic culture: logics of desire and psychopathological forms

Background: In times of rapid and profound sociocultural changes and the related metamorphosis of psychopathological forms, there is a need for greater commitment on the part of clinical phenomenology in analyzing these changes and reciprocal influences between culture and psychopathology. Summary: Questioning one-dimensional definitions of society, this work probes the dialectic of cultures inherent in every society, addressing the complex interpolation of different sets of beliefs, behaviors, and values. The aim was to introduce and discuss a couple of them, which are here named pornographic culture and erotic culture, and the forms that enjoyment and desire take in each of them. The phenomenological method, typically used to investigate individual experience, is thus extended to the analysis of the existential structures of such cultures, exploring the idea that pornographic culture and erotic culture dispose a precise symbolic framework that affects the experience of time, space, body, Self, and Otherness of individuals. Key message: Pornographic culture is characterized by enjoyment imperative, whereas erotic culture is characterized by unattainable fulfilment of one's desire. The "cultural existentials" structured by these cultures are conceived as the inclined plane on which human presence moves and unfolds and are examined in order to try to grasp their resonances with the various forms of suffering characteristic of contemporary age, establishing a dialogue between some distinctive anthropological forms of late modernity - namely homo nevroticus, homo œconomicus, and homo dissipans - and the forms of psychopathological existence in which they can result and crystallize.