Transcultural Mentalisation – Why the Body Matters When Meaning No Longer Translates

A journal titled Body, Mind, and Culture makes a strong claim. It suggests that none of these dimensions can be meaningfully understood in isolation. And yet, in many academic and clinical discourses, the body still appears as an appendix: acknowledged rhetorically, marginalised epistemically. This editorial is written in the conviction that the current global situation – socially, politically, therapeutically – forces us to rethink this hierarchy. We are living in a time in which shared symbolic frameworks are eroding. Words no longer connect as reliably as they once did. Explanations polarise rather than clarify. Moral vocabularies fragment. And increasingly, encounters across cultural, social, and experiential boundaries fail not because people are unwilling to understand – but because understanding itself has become unstable.