Arnaud Plagnol

Two types of functional reasoning are commonly used in psychiatry. For the first type, a mental disorder is conceptualized as the impairment of a mental function: this type of reasoning is nowadays oriented towards research on neurobiological disorders that are supposed to underlie mental disorders. For the second type of functional reasoning, a function is assigned to a mental disorder—that is, a disorder is considered as a defensive process in a mental or family system—and this function has an etiological role, not only in maintaining the disorder, but also in triggering it. We detail this second type of reasoning that gives a strong explanatory value to the notion of function. We briefly analyse some variations of this explanatory value in the psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioural and family/systemic models that are among the main conceptual frameworks currently used in psychiatry. Finally, we attempt to clarify certain epistemological consequences of the irreducibility of functional etiological reasoning in psychiatry.

How to reach Paradise using only a few idealized and limited representational fragments gathered over a lifetime? After having specified the logical questions raised by the (re)presentation of a paradisiacal world, we show that such a world, in order to have the characteristics usually attributed to Paradise (such as unity or plenitude), must satisfy specific representational properties with respect to the Good. In order to clarify the impact of these properties on the access to Paradise, we introduce the Grounded Representation Theory which allows the construction of represented universes. Building on this framework, we then propose directions for a logical analysis of the power of experiences that, from limited fragments of presence, enable one to initiate the ascent towards Paradis.