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...

The current paradigm of mental health has fallen short in its promises to deliver better care and quality of life for those who lives with mental illness. Recent works have expressed the need for more comprehensive frameworks of research, in which phenomenology emerges as a fundamental tool for a new wave interdisciplinary studies with the humanities. In line with this project, this article hopes to explore the relation between education and phenomenologically oriented psychotherapy, through the work of Brazilian educator Paulo (...) Freire. First, we will briefly expose Freire’s biography and main ideas (such as the “banking model of education” and the creation of “culture circles”), showing how they can be useful during the clinical encounter. We will also highlight the importance of dialogical psychotherapy during situations of injustice and oppression. Finally, we will provide some insights that can help build a new paradigm of mental health that is based on a “praxis of freedom”, whether in research or clinical practice. We call this proposal a “Psychotherapy of the Oppressed”. (shrink)

In their article, Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) propose a holistic, ethical, and epistemic analysis of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) in psychotherapeutic settings. They mainly descri...