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)

Once a marginal affair, applied phenomenology is now a vast and vibrant movement. With great success, however, comes great criticism, and critics have been harsh, accusing applied phenomenology’s practitioners of everything from spewing nonsense to assailing down-to-earth researchers with gratuitous jargon. In this article, I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s (...) only of interest to a small number of philosophers; either way, we should explore the experiential dimension by other means. Notwithstanding the enormous body of research in applied phenomenology, few authors have tried to explain what makes it an independent intellectual enterprise distinct from pure phenomenology, and none has defused this dilemma. Here I try my hand at both. After considering eight major approaches to applied phenomenology that fail to defuse the dilemma, I propose an approach that, I argue, does the job, one that understands applied phenomenology as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach. (shrink)

In this chapter, I provide an overview of phenomenological approaches to psychiatric classification. My aim is to encourage and facilitate philosophical debate over the best ways to classify psychiatric disorders. First, I articulate phenomenological critiques of the dominant approach to classification and diagnosis—i.e., the operational approach employed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). Second, I describe the type or typification approach to psychiatric classification, which I distinguish into three different (...) versions: ideal types, essential types, and prototypes. I argue that despite their occasional conflation in the contemporary literature, there are important distinctions among these approaches. Third, I outline a new phenomenological-dimensional approach. I show how this approach, which starts from basic dimensions of human existence, allows us to investigate the full range of psychopathological conditions without accepting the validity of current diagnostic categories. (shrink)

What might be the value of the often rather abstract theoretical reflections of philosophy for understanding the concrete and lived experience of various forms of madness? And is there something co...

Current evidence suggests that the efficacy of psychedelic therapy depends, in part, on the character of psychedelic experiences themselves. One pronounced aspect of psychedelic experiences is alterations to the experience of time, including reports of timelessness or transcending time. However, how we should interpret such reports remains unclear, and this lack of clarity has philosophical and clinical implications. For instance, “true” timelessness may be considered antithetical to having any experience at all, and descriptions of experiences involving “timelessness” are known to (...) be diverse and of varying clinical significance. In this article, we utilize a phenomenological approach to the study of temporality to highlight ambiguities in current constructs used to assess psychedelic experiences. In doing so, we advance some preliminary phenomenological accounts of psychedelic therapy’s mechanisms of action, such as psychedelic temporality acting as a kind of counterpoint for depressive temporality. We conclude by outlining how a dedicated phenomenological research program can provide a nuanced map of psychedelic temporality, guiding future research in a manner that addresses both philosophical and clinical ambiguities. (shrink)

This dissertation is a contribution to the contemporary field of phenomenological psychopathology, or the phenomenological study of psychiatric disorders. The work proceeds with two major aims. The first is to show how a phenomenological approach can clarify and illuminate the nature of psychopathology—specifically those conditions typically labeled as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. The second is to show how engaging with psychopathological conditions can challenge and undermine many phenomenological presuppositions, especially phenomenology’s status as a transcendental philosophy and its corresponding (...) anti-naturalistic outlook. In the opening chapter, I articulate the three layers of the subject matter of phenomenological research—what I refer to as “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” As I argue, while each layer contributes to what we might call the “structure” of human existence, they do not do so in the same way, or to the same degree. Because phenomenological psychopathology—and applied phenomenology in general—aims to characterize how the structure of human existence can change and alter, it is paramount that these layers be adequately delineated and defined before investigating these changes. In chapters two through five, I conduct hermeneutic and phenomenological investigations of psychopathological phenomena typically labeled as major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder. These investigations address the affective aspects of depression and mania, and the embodied aspects of depression. In addition to clearly articulating the nature of these phenomena, I show how certain psychopathological conditions involve changes in the deepest or most fundamental layer of human existence—what I refer to as existentials. As I argue, many of the classical phenomenologists (including Husserl and Heidegger) believed that these structural features were necessary, unchanging, and universal. However, this presupposition is challenged through the examination of psychopathological and neuropathological conditions, undermining the status of phenomenology as a transcendental philosophy. While this challenge to classical phenomenology is only sketched in the early chapters, in chapters six and seven I develop it in more detail in order to achieve two distinct ends. In chapter six I argue that psychopathology and neuropathology not only challenge phenomenology’s status as a transcendental philosophy, but also supply a key to developing a phenomenological naturalism (which I contrast with a naturalized phenomenology). Phenomenological naturalism, as I articulate it, is a position in which phenomenology is not subsumed by the metaphysical and methodological framework of the natural sciences, but nonetheless maintains the capacity to investigate how the natural world stands independent of human subjectivity (and how events in the natural world can bring about changes in the most fundamental structures of human existence). In the seventh chapter I argue that a phenomenology in which existentials are contingent and variable rather than necessary and unchanging allows phenomenologists to contribute to new dimensional approaches to psychiatric classification. Rather than begin from distinct categories of disorder, these approaches begin from distinct core features of human existence. These features, referred to as either dimensions or constructs, can vary in degree and are studied in both normal and pathological forms. (shrink)

In light of the ongoing validity crisis in psychiatric classification, phenomenologically oriented psychiatric study has gained traction. This paper assesses two modes of investigation proposed by phenomenologists in studying mental disorders: the ideal type approach and the essential type approach. Despite the recent suggestion that they are antithetical approaches, I argue that they should constantly constrain and inform each other. In short, I advance a mutual complementarity thesis. Having established this thesis, I conclude by demonstrating how this proposal can function (...) as an heuristic strategy for effectively facilitating the recently proposed psychiatric research initiative, i.e. the ontological project of phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

The problem of addiction to psychoactive substances, such as alcohol and other drugs, has been addressed in psychiatry traditionally from the perspective of a mechanistic-reductionist epistemological model, whose main focus in clinical care is to avoid or suppress the use of these substances, rather than understanding the meaning of a treatment and the meaning of the alterations of consciousness produced by these addictive substances. This paper attempts to contribute towards overcoming this epistemological perspective from the perspective of phenomenological psychopathology. In (...) the first part of the article, the main characteristics of phenomenology and its incorporation into the field of mental health will be presented. Then the issue of addiction will be analysed from two ways of understanding it: the mechanistic-reductionist model and the phenomenological dialectical model. Finally, the pragmatic consequences of the dialectical perspective of phenomenology, called Dialectical Phenomenology (DPh), which seeks to enrich the diagnostic process in the mental health clinic, allowing scientific diagnoses to approach the complexities of clinical reality, will be presented. (shrink)

An unintended consequence of the coronavirus pandemic has been renewed interest in trauma research. In Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory, MaryCatherine McDonald argues that the prevailing trauma research model is “episodic,” meaning that trauma research spikes in the aftermath of significant events. The problem with this model, McDonald contends, is that once the particular event or circumstance loses its everyday salience, also lost is interest in trauma research. Arguably, then, our understanding of trauma is (...) very narrow, if it is indeed the case that the sole point of reference for our trauma archetypes is limited to “major” traumatic events... (shrink)

A partir del marco teórico de la fenomenología husserliana —afín al reciente enfoque dimensional de clasificación psicopatológica—, este escrito propone un análisis comparativo de la depresión y la esquizofrenia. Tras desarrollar algunas ideas básicas de Husserl sobre la descripción fenomenológica de la consciencia temporal, se profundiza en cómo estas bases teóricas pueden fundar una concepción de las mencionadas enfermedades mentales. En este sentido, se apela principalmente a Fuchs y Ratcliffe, quienes consideran que una anomalía en la experiencia de posibilidad daría (...) la clave para precisar tanto la experiencia depresiva como la esquizofrénica. El resultado de este análisis comparativo señala que la diferencia entre las psicopatologías en cuestión recae sobre el carácter de la anomalía de la experiencia de posibilidad: mientras la depresión apunta a una reducción de experiencias de posibilidad práctica, la esquizofrenia refiere a una fragmentación de la consciencia temporal debido a una disfunción protensional. (shrink)

Mental health professionals working in hospitals or community clinics inevitably face the realisation that we possess imperfect conceptual means to understand mental disorders. In this paper the authors bring together ideas from the fields of Philosophy, Psychiatry, Cognitive Psychology and Linguistics to reflect on the ways we represent phenomena of high practical importance that we often take for granted, but are nevertheless difficult to define in ontological terms. The paper follows through the development of the concept of psychosis over the (...) last two centuries in the interplay of three different conceptual orientations: the categorical, dimensional and network approaches. Each of these represent the available knowledge and dominant thinking styles of the era in which they emerged and take markedly different stances regarding the nature of mental phenomena. Without particular commitment to any ontological positions or models described, the authors invite the reader into a thinking process about the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and how they can be reconciled in multidisciplinary settings to benefit the process of patient care. (shrink)