The contemporaneity of the clinical and the clinical of contemporaneity

Abstract

Clinical psychology has historically developed upon a conception of subjectivity inherited from modernity: that of a subject endowed with reflective rationality, capable of directing its own actions and, through them, contributing to the reproduction of the social order. This paper argues that this anthropological configuration is progressively dissolving and that the emerging forms of subjectivity call for a fundamental reconsideration of the theoretical and clinical categories on which contemporary clinical psychology has been built. By integrating psychological theory with the analysis of historical and social transformations, the paper interprets contemporary society as the emergence of a different mode of organizing experience. Its central thesis is that the erosion of the vital forms of social bonding, together with the growing prevalence of environments that are simultaneously highly abstract and perceptually saturated, has transformed the conditions under which the mind stabilizes its representations. From this perspective, the so-called anthropological mutation concerns not merely the increased prevalence of familiar phenomena, but the very mode through which experience is constituted. Consequently, the contemporary patient should not be understood as deviating from a universal model of subjectivity, but rather as expressing a historically and culturally specific configuration of the human condition. The paper concludes by arguing for a revision of the foundational categories of clinical psychology, one that reorients the discipline toward the processes of sense-making and the historical and social conditions through which subjectivity is constituted.