TRACING THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS TO ITS SOURCE IN THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF A PSYCHIATRIST
TRACING THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS TO ITS SOURCE IN THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF A PSYCHIATRIST

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores the guiding motif of psychopathological phenomenological investigation. In other words, it investigates when, how and why the phenomenological method is applied to that, which represents the sole object of study in psychopathology. The exploration begins with a reappraisal of a famous case of melancholia presented by one of the founders of phenomenological psychiatry, Ludwig Binswanger. In critical reading of Binswanger’s analysis I give, I argue that we should shift the focus from a patient to a phenomenologizing psychiatrist, to his or her own experience of the situation and the role it plays in application of the phenomenological approach to the analysis of this situation. Surprisingly, the personality of a psychiatrist has never been regarded as the ultimate object of phenomenological and psychopathological study per se neither by Binswanger, nor by other phenomenologizing psychiatrists, although a certain amount of attention has been paid to the relationship between a clinician and a patient by researchers. Moreover, to date, no one has questioned the relationship between the psychiatrist’s subjective experience, characterized by a strong emotional input, and the process of establishing a phenomenological attitude. In this paper, I reveal how feelings of a psychiatrist encountering psychosis and, in particular, the malaise of a psychiatrist relate directly to applying the phenomenological method in order to understand of the clinical situation. This, in turn, allows me to revise the role of the phenomenological approach, as providing a psychiatrist with the tools for acknowledging the singular relationship, which his or her psychiatric knowledge has with his or her own experience of the clinical encounter.

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