IL DISTURBO DA ANSIA SOCIALE NELLA SOCIETÀ DELL’INCERTEZZA. ANALISI DEL FENOMENO IN UNA PROSPETTIVA PSICOPEDAGOGICA.

This dissertation examines social anxiety as a complex and situated phenomenon at the intersection of medical anthropology, ethnopsychology, and cultural psychopathology. Its central argument is that Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) cannot be understood solely as a clinical category; rather, it constitutes a historically produced configuration of vulnerability shaped by regimes of visibility, familial expectations, moral frameworks, and the broader social conditions of late modernity.The thesis first traces the genealogical development of medical anthropology, from Pitrè’s early insights to De Martino’s theorization of the “crisis of presence,” and onward to Seppilli’s politicization of health and Pizza’s contemporary elaborations. This trajectory reveals the continuity of an intellectual tradition that conceptualizes suffering as relational and symbolically encoded, embedded in cosmologies, power relations, and processes of subject formation. Within this framework, medicine and psychology emerge not as neutral classificatory systems but as institutions actively involved in producing norms, meanings, and modes of presence.A second section critically examines the epistemological and diagnostic apparatuses through which psychological distress is interpreted, with particular attention to the tensions between universalist models, local biologies, and cultural specificity. Culture-bound syndromes, transcultural psychiatry, the medicalization of distress, and the expanding digitalization of diagnostic and therapeutic practices are analysed as dispositifs that shape subjective experience and its clinical intelligibility. In this sense, SAD appears as a sensitive manifestation of contemporary transformations: a disorder arising in contexts marked by constant exposure to the gaze of others, symbolic competition, performative pressure, and the fragility of social bonds.The empirical component employs a mixed-methods design integrating quantitative analyses with qualitative and ethnographic materials. Statistical data delineate patterns of vulnerability and predictors of social anxiety, while narrative interviews and ethnographic observations restore the moral, affective, and relational density of lived experience. From this integrated analysis, a cultural model of social anxiety emerges, linking familial dynamics (parenting styles, forms of control, implicit expectations), educational and digital environments, internalised values, and processes of meaning-making. In this perspective, social anxiety operates as a contemporary idiom through which individuals articulate the tension between recognition, judgment, and the imperative to sustain a coherent social presence.The dissertation concludes by proposing an ethical framework for culturally sensitive clinical practice. It argues for models of care grounded in interpretive engagement, decentring, and relational responsibility, approaches capable of recognising the situated nature of suffering and accommodating epistemic plurality within therapeutic encounters. Care is construed not merely as technical intervention but as a dialogical and moral practice through which subjective narratives can be acknowledged in their full complexity.Overall, the study demonstrates that SAD is not an isolated psychopathological entity, but a phenomenon deeply entangled with historical, cultural, and institutional conditions. The dissertation contributes to a more refined understanding of social anxiety as a situated bio-psycho-social configuration and offers theoretical and methodological tools for a more reflexive, culturally informed clinical practice.