In his work through the early 1930’s, Heidegger determines what it means to be an authentic self through fundamental attunements such as anxiety, boredom, uncanniness and guilt, and equi-primordially via understanding and thrown projection. The way that attunement and understanding structure authentic disclosure of being involves paradoxical gestures juxtaposing meaning and meaninglessness, presence and absence, affirmation and negation, possibility and reality, holism and individuation, normativity and own-ness. The key to navigating and unifying this tangle of contradictory moments, as Heidegger reminds (...) his readers, is in understanding the dynamics of temporality. In this paper I discuss common ways that contemporary readers of Heidegger render authenticity inauthentic by interpreting such tropes as anxiety, the self and the nothing by reference to what Heidegger calls the ordinary conception of time, the sequential emerging, lingering and passing away of beings. Thought via ordinary time, nothingness opposes itself to presence, making authentic anxiety appear similar to depression as the breakdown of possibilities. I contrast these readings with my interpretation of authentic temporality, and explain how my reading of time changes the way the authentic self, attunement and projective understanding disclose themselves. In choosing the particular authors that I cite in support of my representation of inauthentic interpretations of authenticity, I do not mean to imply that these writers are united in their approaches to Heidegger. On the contrary, they differ amongst themselves concerning many aspects of his thinking. My purpose is to highlight what I take to be key points of intersection among their differing accounts. (shrink)

Jaspers identifies empathic understanding as an essential tool for grasping not the mere psychic content of the condition at hand, but the lived experience of the patient. This method then serves as the basis for the phenomenological investigation into the psychiatric condition known as ‘Phenomenological Psychopathology’. In recent years, scholars in the field of phenomenological psychopathology have attempted to refine the concept of empathic understanding for its use in contemporary clinical encounters. Most notably, we have Stanghellini’s contribution of ‘second-order’ empathy (...) and Ratcliffe’s ‘radical empathy’. Through this paper, we reject the pursuit of a renewed version of ‘empathic understanding’, on the grounds that the concept is fundamentally epistemically flawed. We argue that ‘empathic understanding’ risks (1) error, leading to misdiagnosis, mistreatment and an overall misunderstanding of the experience at hand, (2) a unique form of epistemic harm that we call ‘epistemic co-opting’ and (3) epistemic objectification. To conclude, we propose that empathic understanding ought to be replaced with a phenomenological account of Fricker’s virtuous listening. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of employing a phenomenological approach to gain greater insight into the unique experience of psychiatric illness. Researchers in this field have shed light upon a distur...

My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...) further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for each psychopathological (...) disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to introduce Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences’ thematic issue on disordered temporalities. The authors begin by discussing the main reason for the neglect of temporal experience in present-day psychiatric nosologies, mainly, its reduction to clock time. Methodological challenges facing research on temporal experience include addressing the felt sense of time, its structure, and its pre-reflective aspects in the life-world setting. In the second part, the paper covers the contributions to the thematic issue concerning temporal (...) experience in anxiety, depression, mania, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and in recovery from psychosis. The authors argue in favor of integrative and cross-disciplinary approaches. In conclusion, they present time as a significant aspect of human suffering. (shrink)

Obwohl es "die Zeit" nicht gibt, ordnet sich doch alles, was wir erleben, zeitlich. Auch die großen Schlagworte unserer Tage betreffen allesamt von zeitlichen Herausforderungen: Nachhaltigkeit, Resilienz, Transformation, Zeitenwende. Dieses Buch handelt davon, was Zeitliches ausmacht, warum sich die Wirklichkeit zeitlich ordnet und was das mit der wechselseitigen Taktung von Ereignissen und Autonomieerfahrungen zu tun hat. Es werden Missverständnisse aufgelöst, indem aufgezeigt wird, inwiefern es "die Zeit" nicht gibt, es oftmals sogar leidvolle bis hin zu pathologischen Konsequenzen mit sich bringt, (...) wenn Zeit als Gegenstand oder Ressource betrachtet wird. Es ist ein Buch über den Vergleich von Abläufen und darüber, was es bedeutet, wenn Ereignisse miteinander im Takt sind, und wie sie durch Wiederholung und Variation Bedeutung gewinnen und damit "intakt" wirken. Musik und vor allem das Hören dienen als Modelle, um diese allgemeinen zeitlichen Struktureigenschaften der Wirklichkeit begrifflich anklingen zu lassen. Darüber hinaus regen Hyperlinks zu konkreten Hörbeispielen dazu an, sich direkt auch auf besondere Erfahrungen von Zeit einzulassen. - Ein Buch für all diejenigen, die Grundlegendes über Zeit nicht nur lesen wollen, sondern sich im Idealfall auch für einen taktvollen Umgang mit Zeit motivieren lassen möchten. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a phenomenological account of social anxiety disorder (SAD) as a disturbance of lived time through an analysis of first-person accounts informed by Minkowski’s notion of disordered temporality. The core psychopathology of the patient, I argue, is a constricted sense of relational time. Instead of the ordinary sense of a taken-for-granted shared future, the patient experiences time as running a predetermined course toward their social death. This manifests itself in a relational life lived as if it (...) might end at any moment or has already done so. Patients describe the end of their current relationships as self-evident and struggle against it by attempting to evade its immediate occurrence and to postpone it into the less eminent future. At times, patients succumb to passivity and self-blame, revelatory of a sense of an entirely lacking relational future. This phenomenological conceptualization provides an alternative to the predominant cognitive-behavioral (CBT) account of SAD. The CBT approach conceptualizes the core disorder as a set of dysfunctional beliefs about other people’s opinion of the patient. The phenomenological account elucidates a part of the subjective background on which these beliefs come to make sense to the patient. Further, with its concept of social death, the phenomenological account captures the existential contexts, which makes the intensity of the patient’s fear of rejection comprehensible. This way of understanding the patient and their psychopathology has important implications for diagnostic and psychotherapeutic practice. (shrink)