Medicine does not usually consider the human body from an aesthetic point of view. This article explores the notion of the lived body as aesthetic object in anthropological medicine, concentrating on the views of Buytendijk and Straus on human uprightness and gracefulness. It is argued that their insights constitute a counter-balance to the way the human body is predominantly approached in medicine and medical ethics. In particular, (1) the relationship between anthropological, aesthetic and ethical norms, (2) the possible danger of (...) a naturalistic fallacy, (3) the implications for the care of disabled people and (4) the intrinsic aesthetic quality of the human body are dealt with. (shrink)

Problem solving has been empirical psychology’s concern for half a century. Cognitive science’s work on this field has been stimulated especially by the computational theory of mind. As a result, most experimental research originates from a mechanistic approach that disregards genuine experience. On the occasion of a review of problem solving’s foundation, a phenomenological description offers fruitful perspectives. Yet, the mechanistic paradigm is currently dominant throughout problem solving’s established patterns of description. The review starts with a critical historical analysis of (...) the state of problem solving in academic psychology. Subsequently, a phenomenological, contrastive approach is proposed. It questions the notion of problems as “goal-driven” behavior by making vivid experience the subject of discussion. As its given compounds, solvability, oppressiveness, and the problem’s horizon are discussed. Ultimately, an experience-based multimodal notion of the problem is elaborated that relates problems to challenges, fatalities and opportunities as different types of situations. (shrink)

Male-to-female transsexualism manifests itself in the form of a discrepancy between the male sex assigned at birth and the subjective experience of belonging to the female gender, which in many cases also involves a somatic transition by cross-sex hormone treatment and genital surgery. Until now, no studies related to MtF transsexualism have been carried out within the framework of a phenomenological/existential approach. This paradigm would make it possible to better articulate the transsexual experience beyond the simplistic diagnostic criteria by which (...) it is currently defined. In this study, I will reread MtF transsexualism in the light of Ludwig Binswanger’s theories on Mannerism and Jean Paul Sartre’s remarks on the self and the body. I will do this largely by focusing on first-hand accounts of the MtF transsexual’s experience, in other words from a first-person viewpoint. Finally, I will present some considerations on the meaning of psychological intervention in this field. (shrink)

Drawing on Ludwig Binswanger’s work, this paper seeks to reconstruct historically and theoretically his relationship with Freud and Psychoanalysis and to trace his ideas with regard to the Unconscious. Tied to Freud by a friendship lasting thirty years, it started mainly from his encounter with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Alexander Pfänder, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber that Binswanger developed an original system of thinking and clinical application. The issue of the unconscious, beginning from this theoretical (...) shift, underwent a radical reformulation. First, Heideggerian thought allowed him to recognize the importance of different World-Projects, intended as existential a priori characterized by a specific internal normativity. Subsequently, the return to Husserl’s thinking lead Binswanger to rethink again the unconscious issue in light of the field of Passive Synthesis. In this paper we will examine all these issues and reconsider their importance for psychotherapeutic practice. (shrink)

In the introduction to hisAllgemeine Psychopathologie, published in 1913, Karl Jaspers stated that psychology has little value for the psychopathologist because it focuses on all kinds of interesting matters, but not on normal psychic life. In this article we argue that today, in the year 2013, little has changed in this respect. During the past century, normal psychic life has rarely been a topic of research. Clinical psychology has focused primarily on studying three other topics: the mind-body problem, the methodological (...) debate and the psychotherapy debate. Due to this focus, our knowledge in the above-mentioned areas has increased significantly, but the issue raised by Karl Jaspers about normal psychic life has still not been addressed. In this article, we propose that normal psychic life should indeed become the new focus of clinical psychology. We illustrate the importance of this new focus with three examples from clinical psychology: the Global Assessment of Functioning scale, empathy and the emergence of positive psychology during the past decade. We then explore the efficacy of phenomenology for studying this normal psychic life, thereby discovering a useful epistemological basis in Husserl’s systematic phenomenology. Various phenomenological research methods are evaluated in the light of this systematic phenomenology. (shrink)

This essay is a response to proposals to integrate patient-subjective or idiographic data into future versions of nosologies such as the DSM and the ICD. It argues that a nosology is not a suitable vehicle for disseminating psychopathological-phenomenological research results throughout the field. Drawing on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, it examines, on the basis of four postulates, how he applies the Husserlian concept of intentionality in psychiatry and thus arrives at a psychopathological phenomenology. For each individual postulate, we then (...) look in depth at the implications for the current debate around DSM. The conclusion we come to is that, both because of the objective of phenomenological research and because of the complexity of the kind of information involved in findings based on that research, it is impossible to integrate these findings into a nosology without deviating from either them or the nosology itself. (shrink)

Schizophrenia still poses the greatest theoretical problems in contemporary psychopathology. These problems should be investigated through the works of authors who deal with schizophrenia representing different psychological theories. The author takes into consideration psychoanalytic and phenomenological point of view. The statements of those theories are encountered in the field of humanistic psychology.

In this paper, an attempt is made to develop an understanding of the essence of illness based on a reading of Martin Heidegger’s pivotal work Being and Time. The hypothesis put forward is that a phenomenology of illness can be carried out through highlighting the concept of otherness in relation to meaningfulness. Otherness is to be understood here as a foreignness that permeates the ill life when the lived body takes on alien qualities. A further specification of this kind of (...) otherness can be found with the concept of unhomelike being-in-the-world. Health, in contrast to this frustrating unhomelikeness, is a homelike being-in-the-world in which the lived body in most cases has a transparent quality as the point of access to the world in understanding activities. The paper then proposes that the temporal structure of illness can be conceptualised as an alienation of past and future, whereby one’s past and future appear alien, compared with what was the case before the onset of illness. The remainder of the paper follows two paths as regards the temporality of illness. The first path explores the temporality of the body in relation to the temporality of the being-in-the-world of the self. One way of understanding the alienating character of illness is that nature, as the temporality of our bodies, ceases to obey our attempts to make sense of phenomena: the time of the body no longer fits into the time of the self. The second path explored in the paper is that of narrativity. When we make sense of the present, in relation to our future and past, we do so in a special manner, namely, by structuring our experiences in the form of stories. Illness breaks in on us as a rift in these stories, necessitating a retelling of the past and a re-envisioning of the future in an effort to address and change their alienated character. These stories, however, never allow us to leave the silent otherness of our bodies behind. They are stories nurtured by the time of nature at the heart of our existence. It is then claimed that the idea of life’s being a story must be understood in a metaphorical sense, and an exploration of how phenomenology addresses the metaphoric quality of its conceptuality is ushered in. It is pointed out that metaphors can be systematically related to each other and that they always have a founding ground in the orientation and basic activities of the lived body. Therefore, if the concepts used in working out a phenomenological theory of health and illness are, to a certain extent, metaphorical, one could, nevertheless, claim that the metaphoric qualities of the phenomenological concepts are primary in referring back to the lived body and the way it inhabits the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the questions of how and to what extent new antidepressants (selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) could possibly affect the self. I do this by way of a phenomenological approach, using the works of Martin Heidegger and Thomas Fuchs to analyze the roles of attunement and embodiment in normal and abnormal ways of being-in-the-world. The nature of depression and anxiety disorders — the diagnoses for which treatment with antidepressants is most commonly indicated — is also explored (...) by way of this phenomenological approach, as are the basic structures of self-being. Special attention is paid in the analysis to the moods of boredom, anxiety and grief, since they play fundamental roles in depression and anxiety disorders and since their intensity and frequency appear to be modulated by antidepressants. My conclusion is that the effect of these drugs on the self can be thought of in terms of changes in self-feeling, or, more precisely, self-vibration of embodiment. I present the idea of a spectrum of bodily resonance, which extends from the normal resonance of the lived body, in which the body is able to pick up a wide range of different moods; continuing over various kinds of sensitivities, preferences and idiosyncrasies, in which certain moods are favored over others; to cases that we unreservedly label pathologies, in which the body is severely out of tune, or even devoid of tune and thus useless as a tool of resonance. Different cultures and societies favor slightly differently attuned self-styles as paradigmatic of the normal and good life, and the popularity of the SSRIs can therefore be explained, not only by defects of embodiment, but also by the presence of certain cultural norms in our contemporary society. (shrink)

Prior to A Process Model, Gendlin’s theoretical and practical work focused on the interfacing of bodily-felt meaningfulness and symbolization. In A Process Model, Gendlin does something much wider and more philosophically primary. The hermeneutic and pragmatist distinction between the concept of experience, on the one hand, and actual experiential process, on the other, becomes for Gendlin the methodological basis for a radical reconceptualization of the body. Wittgenstein’s formulation of “meaning” as “language-use in situations” is spelled out by Gendlin in embodied (...) terms, yielding a profound new grasp of language, meaning, situation, language-use and culture as interactional body-process. Gendlin, in building his text, answers the pragmatist critique of a wrong progression of thinking where the results of an inquiry are read back to be its premises. With his central concept “eveving” Gendlin shows how the seeming determinacy of preceding structure is opened in the actual occurring. He thereby elaborates a new conception of continuity where the possibility for responsive novelty is emergent in the event itself. The conceptual development of the text itself instances this kind of emergent novelty. We will somewhat follow Gendlin’s own path in using language-in-situations as entry-point into his more fundamental process-thinking, thereby asking ourselves how to engage his new kind of model. In the last part, we introduce some of the philosophical roots of Gendlin’s A Process Model. (shrink)

The paper examines both the phenomenology of the manic self as well as critical aspects of manic neurobiology, focusing, with respect to both domains, on manic temporality. We argue that the distortions of lived time in mania exceed mere acceleration and are fundamental for manic affectivity. Mania involves radical acceleration and radical asynchronicity, which result in an instantaneous existence. People with mania rebel against the facticity of reality and suffer from an existential leap towards the future, in which the self (...) abandons normal temporal boundaries. Excerpts from the interviews with persons with mania who experienced psychosis illustrate this phenomenon. Commenting upon disrupted circadian rhythms in mania and the role of lithium in its treatment the paper posits manic temporality as the link through which manic phenomenology and manic neurobiology intertwine. (shrink)

The paper examines both the phenomenology of the manic self as well as critical aspects of manic neurobiology, focusing, with respect to both domains, on manic temporality. We argue that the distortions of lived time in mania exceed mere acceleration and are fundamental for manic affectivity. Mania involves radical acceleration and radical asynchronicity, which result in an instantaneous existence. People with mania rebel against the facticity of reality and suffer from an existential leap towards the future, in which the self (...) abandons normal temporal boundaries. Excerpts from the interviews with persons with mania who experienced psychosis illustrate this phenomenon. Commenting upon disrupted circadian rhythms in mania and the role of lithium in its treatment the paper posits manic temporality as the link through which manic phenomenology and manic neurobiology intertwine. (shrink)

Recent debates concerning the abolition of the schizophrenia label in psychiatry have focused upon problems with the scientific status of the concept. In this article, I argue that rather than attacking schizophrenia for its lack of scientific validity, we should focus on the conceptual history of this label. I reconstruct a specific tradition when exploring the conceptual history of schizophrenia. This is the concern with the question of the sense of life itself, conducted through the confrontation with schizophrenia as a (...) form of life that does not live, or as Robert Jay Lifton termed it ‘lifeless life’ (1979: 222—39). I conclude by arguing that the contemporary attempt to deconstruct or abolish the schizophrenia concept involves a fundamental shift in concern. The attempt both to normalize psychotic experiences, and to conceive them purely in terms of cognitive processes that can be mapped onto brain function, results in a fundamental move away from the attempt to understand the experience of madness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTime-consciousness has long been a focus of research in phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. We advance and extend this tradition of research by focusing on the character of temporal experience under conditions of mania. Symptom scales and diagnostic criteria for mania are peppered with temporally inflected language: increased rate of speech, racing thoughts, flight-of-ideas, hyperactivity. But what is the underlying structure of temporal experience in manic episodes? We tackle this question using a strategically hybrid approach. We recover and reconstruct three hypotheses (...) regarding manic temporality that were advanced and modeled by two pioneers of clinical phenomenology: Eugène Minkowski and Ludwig Binswanger. We then test, critique, and refine these hypotheses using heterophenomenological methods in an interview-based study of persons with a history of bipolar and a current diagnosis of acute mania. Our conclusions support a central hypothesis due to Minkowski... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper reconsiders Heather Battaly’s argument that empathy is not a virtue. Like Battaly, I argue that empathy is a disposition that includes elements of virtue acquisition, but is not in itself a virtue in the Aristotelian sense. Unlike Battaly, however, I propose a distinction between care and respect. Drawing on Darwall’s view of recognition respect as well as on phenomenologically inspired views of empathy, I argue that respect can be regarded as the moral feeling that is distinctive of empathy. (...) In my view, the feeling of respect towards another’s situated experience grants epistemic dignity, which is the recognition of the intrinsic significance of subjective experience. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the relation between empathy and respect can be relevant for an account of vulnerability that is not opposed to autonomy. (shrink)

Considéré de nos jours comme l’un des principaux représentants de la phénoménologie expérimentale, le psychologue Albert Michotte n’a adopté que sur le tard le terme de « phénoménologie expérimentale » pour qualifier sa démarche. Dans cet article, j’étudie l’usage qu’il fait de cette dénomination, les implications de ce choix ainsi que l’interprétation qu’il en a donnée. Je montre, notamment, comment une discussion entre Michotte et le traducteur anglais de son livre, Tim R. Miles, a été importante pour déterminer l’orientation de (...) la seule présentation explicite que Michotte a publiée de sa phénoménologie expérimentale. L’étude des différents rôles que ce terme a été amené à jouer dans l’œuvre de Michotte montre également les problèmes soulevés par la communication entre différentes disciplines et écoles psychologiques dans lesquelles ce concept a été à la fois employé et débattu : cette communication demandait un véritable travail de traduction. (shrink)

Considéré de nos jours comme l’un des principaux représentants de la phénoménologie expérimentale, le psychologue Albert Michotte (1881-1965) n’a adopté que sur le tard le terme de « phénoménologie expérimentale » pour qualifier sa démarche. Dans cet article, j’étudie l’usage qu’il fait de cette dénomination, les implications de ce choix ainsi que l’interprétation qu’il en a donnée. Je montre, notamment, comment une discussion entre Michotte et le traducteur anglais de son livre, Tim R. Miles, a été importante pour déterminer l’orientation (...) de la seule présentation explicite que Michotte a publiée de sa phénoménologie expérimentale. L’étude des différents rôles que ce terme a été amené à jouer dans l’œuvre de Michotte montre également les problèmes soulevés par la communication entre différentes disciplines (la philosophie et la psychologie expérimentale) et écoles psychologiques dans lesquelles ce concept a été à la fois employé et débattu : cette communication demandait un véritable travail de traduction. (shrink)

The Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger is best known for his existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse) presented in a series of case studies in the 1940s, but his existential anthropology of mania of the early 1930s has received less attention. He introduced this new existential science as a disciplinary hybrid of existential philosophy and clinical psychiatry, and, in doing so, transformed the genre of narrow medical case study into a broader discourse of philosophical anthropology. The very ambitiousness of his method, however, tended to (...) eclipse the individuality of his manic patient; its delineation of the conditioning structures of manic experience rendered the patient’s life-history and her functional state as secondary to these structures. (shrink)

Utilizing the definition of phenomenology originally presented by Edith Stein, it is possible to understand Viktor Frankl's existential psychotherapy as falling well within the phenomenological movement. In this article, Frankl's approach to treatment, which utilizes an induced phenomenological struggle, is examined in detail around its relationship with time. Clinical material is presented to illustrate the described treatment approach.

This article provides a historical overview of the Existential-Phenomenological tradition in psychiatry and psychotherapy, tracing its development from its origin in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical thought, through its major European psychiatric proponents and schools, to its emergence as an influential approach in North America after World War II. The emphasis is on the implicit themes that provide continuity within this movement as well as on the distinctive contributions of individual thinkers. We conclude with a discussion of the present status (...) and future prospects of this tradition. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that William Stern was a forerunner of human science thinking in child psychology. Stern’s view of development, though widely neglected even among humanists, is consonant with human science thought on the whole as well as human science child developmental theory. Certain core characteristics of human science psychology are noted with special emphasis on how they relate to the study of child development. Stern’s views are then shown to be illustrative of these characteristics. In addition, (...) various aspects of Stern’s highly humanistic approach to child development are shown to be relevant today. (shrink)

In this paper, I contend that the narrative presented in Husserl’s recently translated Text 7 is a strikingly clear affirmation and vindication of the psychological adaptation of phenomenology developed by Amedeo Giorgi. I argue that Giorgi’s methodological advocacy of the epoché makes good sense when considered in the context of the history of humanistic psychology. A review of Carl Rogers’s and Abraham Maslow’s attempts to revision psychology shows that they each, in their own way, argued for a turn away from (...) all-out objectivism in research, toward what phenomenologists would refer to as the being-in-the-world-with-others that permeates the relationship between researcher and research participants. But neither could envision or develop a methodological procedure for the researcher to simultaneously suspend their habitual way of making judgements and forming conclusions in that relationship. Instead, they advocated for the extension of a humanized therapeutic clinical presence of openness, acceptance, and affirmation in psychological research. Thus, a Husserlian approach to phenomenological psychology was not only a desirable addition to humanistic thought, it was sorely needed for humanistic psychology to fulfill its research promise. Giorgi, more than any other thinker of his time, provided this addition. It is further argued that Giorgi’s contribution remains highly relevant, though underappreciated. (shrink)

The concern of this study is the consequences of art education information on the experiencing of a painting that has already been experienced in a condition naïve to such information. It is believed that experiential data of viewers with respect to such consequences can be accessed by way of the phenomenological approach. The phenomenological psychology and methodology that are representative of this approach are that of Amedeo P. Giorgi. The employment of Giorgi’s phenomenological psychological method in this study is in (...) the service of education and pedagogy. Giorgi’s history of research on a phenomenological psychology and the method specific to it goes back a number of decades. Four major presentations by Giorgi are the sources for designing the study here in the use of his method. Giorgi’s book is the major source for the understanding of his development and use of the method. (shrink)

Criticizing some psychological approaches that speak in too general terms about both music and religion, this article turns to a precise empirical observation and asks what psychology might possibly contribute to its understanding, after first necessarily questioning what terms such as ‘religion’, ‘religious music’, ‘religious experience’ encompass. Given the nature of the leading question, a cultural–psychological approach is chosen. After refuting a number of commonly heard assertions, and drawing on a number of psychological theories, the article then discusses several empirical (...) observations and argues that contemporary psychology has indeed achieved some progress in dealing with classical questions. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology seeks a priori knowledge of essences and eidetic laws pertaining to conscious experience and its objects. Husserl believes that such eidetic knowledge has a higher epistemic status than the inherently fallible empirical knowledge, but a closer reading of his work shows that even eidetic claims are subject to error and open to modification. In this article, I develop a self-correcting account of Husserl’s method of eidetic variation, arguing that eidetic variation plays a critical role in both (...) challenging and improving upon the eidetic results in phenomenology. More specifically, I argue that the self-correcting account of eidetic variation 1) is consistent with Husserl’s own formulations of his eidetic methodology and epistemic principles; 2) captures the dual epistemic function of eidetic variation as means for both testing and intuitively validating eidetic claims; and 3) offers methodological support for contemporary attempts to integrate eidetic variation with non-eidetic methods and resources. To substantiate these claims, I first contrast the self-correcting account with the falsificationist interpretations of eidetic variation. Then, I turn to three applications of eidetic variation in order to examine how eidetic phenomenology could draw from real-life deviations, artificial variations, and critical–historical reflection. The goal is to lay the methodological groundwork for a self-correcting and integrative account of eidetic variation and illustrate its usefulness in research practice. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to re-think the question of the world of persons with schizophrenia from the perspective of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler and that of the Japanese psychiatrist Bin Kimura. So far, no comparison between these two authors has been made, even though there are several convergences and evidence of Scheler’s indirect influence on Bin Kimura through Viktor von Weizsäcker. In recent years, Dan Zahavi, Louis Sass, and Josef Parnas have interpreted the modus vivendi of schizophrenic patients (...) in relation to a disturbance on the level of the “minimal self”. Subsequently, the discussion has highlighted the importance of disorders on the level of intercorporeality and intersubjectivity (Thomas Fuchs) and on the level of “existential feelings” (Matthew Ratcliffe). This paper argues that Max Scheler and Bin Kimura allow us to focus on an aspect which has been neglected so far: that of a “relational self” that relates to the very foundation of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality and that can thus be reborn in the encounter with the other and may position itself differently in the world. In Scheler’s perspective, the world of persons with schizophrenia is the result of an axiological disorder (valueception) that impairs contact with the primordial life impulse (Lebensdrang). As a consequence, they are incapable of attuning emotionally and socially with others: this prevents the singularity from being reborn in the encounter with the other and forces them to position themselves in their own solipsistic universe. Moving in a similar direction, Bin Kimura interprets the world of persons with schizophrenia as the result of a disorder of aida (one of the central concepts of Japanese culture that indicates the space of being in between). The disorder of aida compromises the basic relationship (Grundverhältnis in the sense of Viktor von Weizsäcker) and hinders what Bin Kimura calls festum, i.e. the birth of subjectivity, so that it is experienced by persons with schizophrenia only as ante festum. Starting from these two perspectives, I argue the existence of an axiological and anthropogenetic dimension of psychopathology. I begin with a discussion of Zahavi’s concept of minimal self and the thesis that reveals the disorders on this level of subjectivity as the origin of the world of persons with schizophrenia. I, then, analyze Max Scheler’s position and its historic importance for the emergence of phenomenological psychopathology. Thereafter, I introduce the concepts of “disorder of aida” (Bin Kimura) and “disorder of ordo amoris” (Max Scheler). Finally, I develop the concept of a “psychopathology of ordo amoris” by also comparing it with Ratcliffe’s thesis of “existential feelings”. (shrink)

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought (...) within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws. (shrink)