Understanding the mental life of persons with psychosis/schizophrenia has been the crucial challenge of psychiatry since its origins, both for scientific models as well as for every therapeutic encounter between persons with and without psychosis/schizophrenia. Nonetheless, a preliminary understanding is always the first step of phenomenological as well as other qualitative research methods addressing persons with psychotic experiences in their life-world. In contrast to Rashed's assertions, in order to achieve such understanding, phenomenological psychopathologists need not necessarily adopt the transcendental-phenomenological attitude, (...) which, however, is often required if performing phenomenological philosophy. Additionally, in the course of these scientific endeavors, differences between persons with psychosis/schizophrenia and so-called normal people seem to have a methodological function and value driving the scientist in her enterprise. Yet, these differences do not extend to ethical dimensions, and therefore, do not by any means touch ethical equality. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explain how Karl Jaspers’ concept of empathy can be expanded by drawing upon the tradition of philosophical phenomenology. In the first section, we offer an account of Jaspers' concepts of empathy and incomprehensibility as he develops them in General Psychopathology and “The Phenomenological Approach in Psychopathology.” In the second section, we survey the recent literature on overcoming Jaspers' notion of incomprehensibility and expanding his concept of empathy. In the third section, we outline the levels of investigation (...) at which phenomenological inquiries into psychopathology may proceed. These levels of human existence are, in descending order of depth, (1) phenomenal experiences, (2) interpretive frameworks, (3) modes of existence, and (4) existentials. In the fourth and final section, we argue that to fully empathically comprehend patients with schizophrenia and other mental disorders, the possibility of alterations at all four levels of existence must be acknowledged. (shrink)