Phenomenology and the Interpretation of Psychopathological Experience

Abstract

What do psychiatrists encounter when they encounter psychopathological experience in their patients? How should we interpret such experiences? In this chapter, we contrast a checklist approach to diagnosis, which is standard today and which treats psychiatric symptoms and signs (i.e., “the psychiatric object”; Marková & Berrios, 2009; see also Chapter 2, this volume) as readily operationalizable object-like entities, with a nonstandard phenomenological approach that emphasizes the importance of a specific kind of interpretive interview. The descriptive methods of today's psychiatry perpetuate what has been called psychiatry's “problem of description” (Spitzer, 1988) because these methods are not adequately tailored to the ontological nature of the “psychiatric object.” The psychiatric object is typically portrayed as an objective, thinglike entity, unproblematically graspable as it exists “in itself” through a behaviorist third-person perspective and as being indicative of a specific and modular physiological dysfunction. We will propose a different epistemological approach, considering the nature of mental disorders to be primarily constituted by the patient's anomalies of experience, expression, and existence that typically involve suffering and dysfunction (Parnas, Sass, & Zahavi, 2013).

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