Psychopathology, phenomenology and affordances

Phenomenology and Psychopathology

As the systematic project of investigating the structures of subjective experience, phenomenology may also be considered the foundational science for psychopathology. Though it methodically suspends any assumptions about causal explanation, it provides a rich framework for the analysis of subjectivity and its disturbances in mental disorders, thus also leading to testable hypotheses about the u...

Rediscovering Psychopathology: The Epistemology and Phenomenology of the Psychiatric Object

Questions concerning both the ontology and epistemology of the "psychiatric object" (symptoms and signs) should be at the forefront of current concerns of psychiatry as a clinical neuroscience. We argue that neglect of these issues is a crucial source of the stagnation of psychiatric research. In honor of the centenary of Karl Jaspers' book, General Psychopathology, we offer a critique of the c...

Descriptive psychopathology, phenomenology, and the legacy of Karl Jaspers

With his early publications (1910-1913), Karl Jaspers created a comprehensive methodological arsenal for psychiatry, thus laying the foundation for descriptive psychopathology. Following Edmund Husserl, the founder of philosophical phenomenology, Jaspers introduced phenomenology into psychopathology as "static understanding," ie, the unprejudiced intuitive reproduction (Vergegenwärtigung) and d...

The problem of psychopathology and phenomenology. What is viable and not viable in phenomenological psychiatry.

The epistemological underpinnings of psychiatric theory and practice have always been unstable. This reflects the essential contradiction existing between the task (the description and individuation of speech and behavior as psychopathological symptoms) and tools (semiotics). As a result of this contradiction, the history of psychiatry is one of permanent crisis in which there are moments of te...

Phenomenology and Post-Modernity