The three essays reprinted in this book were first published in 1963 as individual chapters of a psychiatric treatise entitled Psychiatrie der Gegen wart (Psychiatry of the Present Day). The editors, W. H. GRUHLE (Bonn), R. JUNG (Freiburg/Br. ), W. MAYER-GROSS (Birmingham, England), M. MUL LER (Bern, Switzerland), had not planned an encyclopedic presentation; they did not intend to present a "handbook" which would be as complete as possible in details and bibliographic reference. Their intention was to "raze the walls" (...) separating Continental and Anglo-Saxon psychiatries and to offer a synopsis of developments in psychiatry during the last decades on an international basis. The editors requested, therefore, cooperation of scholars from many foreign countries, large and small, on both sides of the Atlantic. A section entitled "Borderlands of Psychiatry", in which MARGARET MEAD (New York) discusses the relation of "Psychiatry and Ethnology", HANS HEIMAN (Bern), the relation of "Religion und Psychiatrie", and ROBERT VOLMER (Paris), "Art et Psychiatrie", is a good illustration of the trilingual character of the whole work. Two of the editors, GRUHLE and MAYER-GROSS, died before the publi cation had been completed. In a kind of posthumous eulogy, Professor JUNG and Professor MULLER praised the initiative and accomplishments of MAYER-GROSS, "who during the last five years of his life had given a great deal of his time to this work. He had set his mind on a synthesis of German and Anglo-Saxon psychiatry. (shrink)

Descartes dont la psychologie traite de l’homme qui peut se tromper fournit dans ses Passions de Vâme l’explication la plus radicale de la possibilité de cette erreur : c’est justement par les passions que se manifeste la nature humaine inévitablement su jette à l’erreur. Bien que la psychologie de Descartes se serve de notions à la fois anthropologiques et mécaniques, et bien qu’elle soit fondée ainsi sur une combinaison fondamentale de ces deux manières de voir, c’est néanmoins l’interprétation mécanique qui (...) depuis, seule, a fait école. La psychologie anthropologique moderne traite, elle aussi, de l’homme qui peut se tromper ; elle se rapproche donc, dans une certaine mesure, de la pensée cartésienne, sans cependant y revenir. (shrink)

The three essays reprinted in this book were first published in 1963 as individual chapters of a psychiatric treatise entitled Psychiatrie der Gegen wart (Psychiatry of the Present Day). The editors, W. H. GRUHLE (Bonn), R. JUNG (Freiburg/Br. ), W. MAYER-GROSS (Birmingham, England), M. MUL LER (Bern, Switzerland), had not planned an encyclopedic presentation; they did not intend to present a "handbook" which would be as complete as possible in details and bibliographic reference. Their intention was to "raze the walls" (...) separating Continental and Anglo-Saxon psychiatries and to offer a synopsis of developments in psychiatry during the last decades on an international basis. The editors requested, therefore, cooperation of scholars from many foreign countries, large and small, on both sides of the Atlantic. A section entitled "Borderlands of Psychiatry", in which MARGARET MEAD (New York) discusses the relation of "Psychiatry and Ethnology", HANS HEIMAN (Bern), the relation of "Religion und Psychiatrie", and ROBERT VOLMER (Paris), "Art et Psychiatrie", is a good illustration of the trilingual character of the whole work. Two of the editors, GRUHLE and MAYER-GROSS, died before the publi cation had been completed. In a kind of posthumous eulogy, Professor JUNG and Professor MULLER praised the initiative and accomplishments of MAYER-GROSS, "who during the last five years of his life had given a great deal of his time to this work. He had set his mind on a synthesis of German and Anglo-Saxon psychiatry. (shrink)

Il s?agit de nuancer l?opposition massive, mise en place par Michel Foucault dans sa préface à la traduction anglaise du Normal et le patho­logique , entre la tradition phénoménologique et l?épistémologie française. Cette opposition est raffinée sur la base d?une confrontation entre la pensée de Georges Canguilhem et celle du psychiatre allemand Erwin Straus, qui tâche, dans son ouvrage majeur Vom Sinn der Sinne , de poser les fondements d?une psychologie phénoménologique. La confrontation s?organise autour de deux thématiques (...) abordées de manière centrale par les deux auteurs, l?une portant sur la physiologie, le problème du réflexe et les rapports entre le vivant et son milieu, l?autre sur les notions de normal et de pathologique. (shrink)

This paper provides a close reading of Erwin Straus’ “The Upright Posture” from a disability studies perspective. Straus argues that the upright posture dominates the human world. But he excludes those who dwell in it otherwise. By reviewing phenomenological disability literature, this paper asks what a disabled phenomenology would look like, one rooted in the problem of inclusion from the outset. Disabled phenomenology addresses ‘subjectivity’ critically, asking: what socio-material arrangements make subjectivity possible in the first place? This (...) project is, I argue, equal parts political economy and existential phenomenology. I conclude with some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Despite his major contributions to phenomenology, the writings on suggestion and hypnosis by Erwin Straus (1891–1975) have been underappreciated. In his German language publications of 1925 and 1927, Straus argues that we cannot elucidate the phenomenon of suggestion solely or even primarily through experimental design, a narrow natural scientific viewpoint, or an emphasis on abnormal or special states of dissociation. In contrast, a phenomenological study that begins with everyday experience demonstrates that suggestion is part of normal experience, (...) and its understanding must include the possibility both of acceptance and of rejection. Straus’s arguments in these essays are enhanced by his later books and articles developing the I-Allon relationship, the process of we-formation, and the distinction of pathic and gnostic moments of sensation and perception. By fully situating the phenomenon within theLebenswelt, Straus’s analysis of suggestion is a major contribution to phenomenology. (shrink)

The article presents Erwin W. Straus’ unpublished manuscript “Temporal Horizons” from 1952. In the paper, in addition to an extensive philosophical discussion with St. Augustine, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, Straus elaborates on his idea of a unified view of temporal experience, comprising both the personal and the impersonal dimensions of time. The manuscript also contains an interview with a psychotic patient, which is supposed to exemplify Straus' core idea on the psychotic temporal experience, according to (...) which the break of the invisible bond between immanent or personal, and clock or impersonal time leads to a loss of a sense of reality. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion of sensing (Empfinden) as developed by Erwin Straus. It argues that the notion of sensing is at the center of Strauss's thought about animal and human experience. Straus's originality consists in approaching sensory experience from an existential point of view. Sensing is not a mode of knowing. Sensing is distinguished from perceiving but is still a mode of relation to exteriority, and is situated on the side of what is usually called affectivity. (...) At the same time Strauss redefines the field of that which is commonly characterized as affectivity. Sensing designates a stratum that lies deeper than the division between perceiving and feeling (s'éprouver), a self-affection that is not an alternative to the opening upon exteriority. It corresponds to a mode of immediate communication, to a sympathy with the world that does not entail any thematic dimension, but does not fall back into a blind fusion. Rather, sensing is something in the living being's mode of moving that is irreducible, and that includes a tending toward something. (shrink)

How much the sense of an event depends on the one who lives it? According to Erwin Straus, there are some phenomena, which impose their sense, and no one in the audience of a performance, for example, can see a wildfire without being afraid of and escaping from it. Binswanger criticizes such a conception and claims that the sense of the event depends on the freedom and the biography of the subject. In this paper we would like to (...) replace the issue in its phenomenological context and to establish that Straus as well as Binswanger are right and wrong but not of course in the same way. (shrink)