We investigated family members’ lived experience of Parkinson’s disease aiming to investigate opportunities for well-being. A lifeworld-led approach to healthcare was adopted. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to explore in-depth interviews with people living with PD and their partners. The analysis generated four themes: It’s more than just an illness revealed the existential challenge of diagnosis; Like a bird with a broken wing emphasizing the need to adapt to increasing immobility through embodied agency; Being together with PD exploring the kinship (...) within couples and belonging experienced through support groups; and Carpe diem! illuminated the significance of time and fractured future orientation created by diagnosis. Findings were interpreted using an existential-phenomenological theory of well-being. We highlighted how partners shared the impact of PD in their own ontological challenges. Further research with different types of families and in different situations is required to identify services required to facilitate the process of learning to live with PD. Care and support for the family unit needs to provide emotional support to manage threats to identity and agency alongside problem-solving for bodily changes. Adopting a lifeworld-led healthcare approach would increase opportunities for well-being within the PD illness journey. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ubiquity of MoodsMatthew R. Broome (bio) and Havi Carel (bio)Keywordsphenomenology, Heidegger, moods, affects, meaning, self, philosophyPhilosophy is often caricatured as one of the most disconnected and anemic academic enterprises. Yet in philosophers’ own accounts of what drew them to the problems they have sought to address they answer, typically, in two broad, passionate, ways: wonder or anxiety. As such, philosophy, and philosophers’ self-understanding of themselves and their enterprise, (...) can serve as a way to address some of the important topics raised by Rosfort and Stanghellini. Even for philosophers, the emotional experience of moods and affects is employed in narrativity, or at least, employed when one is called to give an account of oneself. One could envisage a party conversation along these lines:So why did you become a philosopher?Well, I wanted to go to university but wasn’t interested in science or in the humanities and I’ve always been dreadful at languages.(Laugh) But you must like something about it as you wouldn’t have become a professor?You know how it is... you drift into things. I did well as an undergraduate, my tutor suggested I should do a PhD. Found an excellent supervisor, and got a few papers published and then a teaching post....You must be very committed to the subject.Ummm—I guess so. I thought about joining the civil service after my PhD, but always managed to find work and the hours are much more flexible at universities!Well I think it is amazing: to think and teach about such important things.Do you?There is something slightly baffling here that may simply be part of the inherent irony and self-deprecation of some academics. The philosopher's interlocutor is asking about what philosophy means to the philosopher: why he has given his life to it. As such, she is alluding to a deeper, philosophical question that, after decades of falling out of favor, is returning to the attention of philosophers: namely, how has philosophy given your life meaning? The philosopher responds with possible irony, banality, or superficiality and invokes luck rather than meaning in his narrative. He serves as Nietzsche's feared nihilist. The account offered also seems to fail to meet normative standards, and depending on how the philosopher carries it off, this gap between expectation and reality in the conversation may generate humor.However, the greater likelihood is that the conversation engenders perplexity and disappointment in the interviewer. Rather like the characters in Evelyn Waugh's early novels, the philosopher is buffeted passively by life and luck and eschews agency or meaning. In Waugh's skilled hands this becomes tragic comedy; for the philosopher and his interlocutor we have disconnection and sadness. The crucial reason for this is that we need to use terms referring to moods, affects, meaning, and emotion when we offer an account of ourselves and when we try to understand ourselves. [End Page 267] Otherwise, something is missing and the reason a person gives for their actions either look like poor reasons or not reasons at all (Bortolotti and Broome 2008). Further, agency, rationality, and self-knowledge may themselves be dependent upon reason-giving.In invoking moods and affects in one's narrative the practical understanding (or ‘affordances’) of the world one inhabits are laid open in clear view. Hence Aristotle's account of wonder as the stimulus for philosophy. Aristotle says: ‘For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters’ (1984, 1554). Conversely, given the experience of transcendence, of ambiguity, of finitude rather than wondrous awe, the philosopher may be motivated by anxiety (Kant's awakening from his dogmatic slumbers, Heidegger's battles with ‘Crisis’ and the flight of the gods). Either manner of accounting for one's interest seems to work normatively in the giving of reasons and in generating a narrative, and, moreover, a philosophical narrative.Our fictional dialogue and discussion aims to reinforce the important link between narrative, reason-giving and moods and affects argued for by Rosfort... (shrink)

According to a widely accepted belief, we cannot know our own death—death means ‘nothing’ to us. At first sight, the meaning of ‘nothing’ just implies the negation or absence of ‘something’. Death then simply refers to the negation or absence of life. As a consequence, however, death has no meaning of itself. This leads to an ontological paradox in which death is both acknowledged and denied: death is … nothing. In this article, I investigate whether insight into the ontological paradox (...) of the nothingness of death can contribute to a good end-of-life. By analysing Aquinas’, Heidegger’s and Derrida’s understanding of death as nothingness, I explore how giving meaning to death on different ontological levels connects to, and at the same time provides resistance against, the harsh reality of death. By doing so, I intend to demonstrate that insight into the nothingness of death can count as a framework for a meaningful dealing with death. (shrink)

The confusion surrounding Heidegger's account of death in Being and Time has led to severe criticisms, some of which dismiss his analysis as incoherent and obtuse. I argue that Heidegger's critics err by equating Heidegger's concept of death with our ordinary concept. As I show, Heidegger's concept of death is not the same as the ordinary meaning of the term, namely, the event that ends life. But nor does this concept merely denote the finitude of Dasein's possibilities or the groundlessness (...) of existence, as William Blattner and Hubert Dreyfus have suggested. Rather, I argue, the concept of death has to be understood both as temporal finitude and as finitude of possibility. I show how this reading addresses the criticisms directed at Heidegger's death analysis as well as solving textual problems generated by more limited interpretations of the concept. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the question concerning the nature of human illness in Heidegger’s thought according to the Daseinsanalytic approach to psychology in its broadest sense. In this regard, we will first clarify the relationship between illness, as a phenomenon of privation in Heidegger’s own words, the state of health, and the human specific mode of being in this framework which determines how being healthy is to be understood appropriately. Then, the importance of the general existential structures of human being, (...) according to Heidegger, such as human spatiality and the temporal feature of human Da-sein, for the Daseinsanalytic illustration of different forms of pathological being-in-the-world will be considered. Finally, we will bring into focus a theoretical challenge related to the Daseinsanalytic understanding of human health, concerning the problematic link between the standard of human openness to the highest degree, freedom for the possibilities of life and existential awareness on the one hand, and the ordinary normal experience of responding to the basic human existential traits as a touchstone of the state of health and the deviations from it, on the other. Keywords: Heidegger, Boss, Human Illness, Health, Daseinsanalytic Psychopathology 1. Introduction Clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and medical practitioners work on the basis of specific concepts of human health and illness. While the question concerning the nature of health and illness, as a philosophical question, is beyond the scope of the scientific research, it is the philosopher’s task to ask about what has been taken for granted in advance in this regard. Bringing into light the significance of the mentioned question can be considered as one of the significant contributions of the collaboration of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, with the Swiss psychiatrist, Medard Boss, in the development of the Daseinsanalytic movement. 2. Illness as Privation Following Heidegger’s discussion of illness as a privative phenomenon, it is argued that in order to understand being ill appropriately, we must first determine what it means to be healthy, for illness is nothing but the lack of health that is to be recovered through the therapeutic process. The meaning of health itself as a mode of being would depend upon the way we approach human being. Therefore, Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein can be of considerable importance in this connection. 3. Health and Human Existence From the Daseinsanalytic perspective, existing as a realm of openness, we are essentially our possibilities of relating to what shows itself to us. Human health is to be considered as being human in its fullness with respect to such a way of being. Accordingly, health in this context would be described as being free for the life possibilities, sustaining our openness to the world to the highest possible degree. Illness, then would be essentially the constriction of one’s own possibilities and what the therapeutic process can do would be to help the clients overcome such problematic constrictions. 3. Daseinsanalysis and Pathology Daseinsanalysis as a phenomenological approach to pathology is concerned with the life-world of the clients, considering the altered structures of human existence. It focuses on the clarification of the way one carries out a disturbed form of being-in-the-world in pathological experiences. Here, the description of the structural aspects of the way we normally relate to the world provides a basis for the characterization of different forms of human illness. This approach offers a specific classification of pathological problems based on the noticeable disturbances in the normal form of responding to the existential traits. 4. The Problematic Link Daseinsanalysis has difficulties in coping properly with a theoretical issue related to the link between its prescriptive pattern of human health that can be characterized by the terms such as the openness to the highest degree, freedom for the possibilities of life, full human way of being, and existential awareness, and its phenomenological approach to pathological experience that has its point of departure in the description of normal form of being-in-the-world. Though the roots of the problem can be traced back to specific elements in Heidegger’s philosophy, thinking about the problematic link appropriately is a necessity for the reassessment of the Daseinsanalytic notion of health and its theoretical strength when the relationships between the issues such as the existential awareness, authentic creativity, being-satisfied with one’s own life, and the so-called mental illness are under consideration. 5. Conclusion Although Daseinsanalysis generally deepens our understanding of pathological experiences, it suffers from the mentioned theoretical problem as a result of the application of a double standard regarding human health. Two possible solutions to the problem can be as follows: 1) the idealization of the notion of health, with the recognition of its implication that the domain of illness, as a deficiency in being human in its fullness, may include both normal and abnormal forms of experience, and 2) taking a mere descriptive stance similar to the alternative phenomenological approaches in this field with the acceptance of the normality as its base for the illustration of the experiential modifications, rather than the commitment to the both at the same time, which may give rise to ambiguity and confusion. Depending on what we are seeking for, each approach has its positive aspects. A mere descriptive approach would be of great importance when the aim is to have a better understanding of clinical data, keeping the connection with the medical concepts and classifications. But in a different context, the idealization of the notion of health would enable us to move beyond the boundaries of the common notion of health and its limitations to clarify the possibility and significance of strengthening the richness of our life in accordance with human capacities, and to bring into focus the possibility of making reference to a broader range of human illness References: - Askay, Richard and Farquhar, Jensen. Of Philosophers and Madmen: A Disclosure of Martin Heidegger, Medard Boss, and Sigmund Freud, Amsterdam: Rodopi. - Becker, Ernest. the Denial of Death, New York: The Free Press. - Boss, Medard. Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, L. B. Refebre, New York: Basic Books. - Boss, Medard. Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, S Conway and A. Cleaves, New York: Jason Aronson. - Boss, Medard. Martin Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars, B. Kenny, in: K. Hoeller, Heidegger and Psychology, Seattle: Promethean Press. (shrink)