The Power of Phenomenology: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2005
Psychoanalysis has started to recoup, often quite implicitly, a more phenomenological stance, ever since psychoanalysts have started working with borderline and psychotic patients. As many of these patients have commonly been through traumatic experiences, psychoanalysts have been using an approach that questions the role of traditional psychoanalytical interpretation and pays more attention to the patient's inner conscious experiences; this approach is characteristic of a specifi c form of contemporary psychiatry: phenomenological psychopathology, founded by Karl Jaspers in 1913 and developed into a form of psychotherapy by Ludwig Binswanger, with his Daseinsanalyse. If what we could call a phenomenological 'temptation' has been spreading over psychoanalysis, so too has a psychoanalytical 'temptation' always been present in phenomenological psychopathology. In fact, even though this branch of psychiatry has led us towards a deeper understanding of the characteristics of psychotic being-in-the-world, its therapeutic applications have never been adequately formalised, much less have they evolved into a specifi c technique or a structured psychotherapeutic approach. Likewise, phenomenological psychotherapy has always held an anaclitic attitude towards psychoanalysis, accepting its procedures but refusing its theoretical basis because it is too close to that of the objectifying natural sciences. Psychoanalytic 'temptation' and phenomenological 'temptation' can thus be considered as two sides of the same coin and outline a trend in psychoanalytic and phenomenological literature which points out the fundamental role of the patient's inner conscious experiences in the treatment of borderline and psychotic patients.
Phenomenology in Psychoanalysis: Still an Open Debate?
Psychopathology
In a recent book Cristopher Bollas, one of the greatest contemporary psychoanalysts, tells about how he began to bring together phenomenology and psychoanalysis in the clinical setting at the beginning of his career. Working with psychotic patients, he realized that it was first necessary to "absorb" their view of reality before being able to reflect on the mad scenarios of psychosis. In what world did they live? How did they perceive it? Only by "mirroring" this back to the patients was it possible to offer them the experience of being in front of someone trying to understand their world view. Today, phenomenology has been spreading over psychoanalysis more than one can think it did in the past. The aim of this paper is to review and discuss the most relevant theoretical-clinical areas characterizing contemporary psychoanalysis in which phenomenology can claim a legitimate (or still illegitimate for someone) position. The main areas that will be discussed are: (a) the larger relational system or field in which human experience is continually shaped, i.e., the intersubjective matrix in which we are embedded; (b) the capacity to think about the "what" of the patients' experience , rather than the "why" (especially with the most severely disturbed ones); and (c) the crisis of the primacy of interpretation in the analytical technique. Obviously, this review does not have the ambition to be exhaustive. Rather, it just wants to (re)open the discussion on a still controversial but very current topic.
2018
What is phenomenology? How can it be applied to psychiatry? More importantly, how can it benefit psychiatry? These are the fundamental questions that are attended to throughout this thesis. The inquiry starts by addressing misconceptions of phenomenology, providing an account of phenomenology through an exegesis of key phenomenological texts. Then an important overlap between phenomenology and psychiatry is highlighted, viz., their fascination with human consciousness. Phenomenology and psychiatry investigate consciousness in a fundamentally different manner, but it doesn’t follow that phenomenology is irrelevant to or inapplicable within psychiatry. To demonstrate this, examples are given and discussed of effective applications of phenomenology that have been put forth in recent years and are currently used today. In the final chapter, it is argued that the nuances phenomenology has to offer to psychiatric investigations are pertinent for psychiatrists to consider. But what is ultimately at stake in applying phenomenology to psychiatry? In the thesis, it is claimed that in doing so phenomenology offers practical benefits to psychiatric research, psychotherapy, and in clinical psychiatric settings.
A Phenomenological-Contextual, Existential, and Ethical Perspective on Emotional Trauma
After a brief overview of the author's phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective, the paper traces the evolution of the author’s conception of emotional trauma over the course of three decades, as it developed in concert with his efforts to grasp his own traumatized states and his studies of existential philosophy. The author illuminates two of trauma’s essential features: (1) its context-embeddedness—painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when it cannot find a context of emotional understanding in which it can be held and integrated, and (2) its existential significance—emotional trauma shatters our illusions of safety and plunges us into an authentic Being-toward-death, wherein we must face up to our finitude and the finitude of all those we love. The paper also describes the impact of trauma on the phenomenology of time and the sense of alienation from others that accompanies traumatic temporality. The author contends that the proper therapeutic comportment toward trauma is a form of emotional dwelling. He concludes with a discussion of the implications of all these formulations for the development of an ethics of finitude.
Ethos: Journal of Psychological Anthropology, 2012
""In recent decades, human experience has become focus or frame for a wide variety of projects in psychological anthropology and beyond. Like 'culture,' which it arguably seeks to either qualify or displace, the concept of 'experience' has generated its own interpretive literature, competing schools of analysis, and internal resistances. We propose that the anthropology of experience has achieved a degree of recognition and maturity that renders genealogical reflection, stocktaking, and agenda setting both possible and necessary. Although the anthropology of experience, like experience itself, does not (and perhaps should not) lend itself to easy definition as a singular or unified theoretical paradigm, it does involve a fluid constellation of themes shared by what are traditionally regarded as parallel or divergent lines of inquiry: what might be glossed imperfectly as the phenomenological and psychoanalytic schools within sociocultural anthropology. Here we aim neither for naıve synthesis nor a mathematical sum of parts, but for more adequate ways of depicting and making sense of what Dewey calls 'the inclusive integrity of "experience."’ This will require more concerted attention to the sources of ethnographic inquiétude—the gaps, silences, limits, and opacities—that either preoccupy or remain overlooked within both traditions." [experience, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, phenomenological anthropology, psychoanalytic anthropology, inquiétude]""
Clinical phenomenology and its psychotherapeutic consequences, 2013
Can phenomenology be therapeutic in general and especially in the case of schizophrenia? This question is advanced within the framework of the dialectical model in psychopathology whose central ideas are the following: mental pathology contains "positive" features that cannot be simply reduced to negativ-ity (abnormality or absence of mental health), and persons with mental illnesses are not merely passively thrown in their vulnerability , rather they are actively engaged in trying to cope, solve and make sense of it. The dialectical model is employed in the psychotherapy of persons with schizophrenia by applying two concepts: position-taking and perspectivism.
PRACTISING PHENOMENOLOGY: SOME REFLECTIONS AND CONSIDERATIONS
This paper looks at how phenomenology as a research method can be applied to human phenomena particularly in the therapeutic context. It makes connections between the phenomenological method and existing therapeutic practice. Some suggestions are made about the appropriateness of specific verbal and non verbal interventions.