New Perspectives in Phenomenological Psychopathology: Its Use in Psychiatric Treatment

Abstract

Phenomenological psychopathology is a body of scientific knowledge on which the clinical practice of psychiatry is based since the first decades of the twentieth century, a method to assess the patient's abnormal experiences from their own perspective, and more importantly, a science responsible for delimiting the object of psychiatry. Recently, the frontiers of phenomenological psychopathology have expanded to the productive development of therapeutic strategies that target the whole of existence in their actions. In this article, we present an overview of the current state of this discipline, summing up some of its key concepts, and highlighting its importance to clinical psychiatry today. Phenomenological psychopathology understands mental disorders as modifications of the main dimensions of the life-world: lived time, lived space, lived body, intersubjectivity, and selfhood. Psychopathological symptoms are the expression of a dialectical modification of the proportions of certain domains of the life-world or of the lived experience. The far-reaching relevance of the concepts of proportion and dialectics for the clinical agenda is explored. The article presents two contemporary models for clinical practice based on phenomenological psychopathology: Dialectical-proportional oriented approach and Person-centered dialectic approach (P.H.D. method). The main characteristics of these approaches are considered, as well as the new perspectives they bring to the challenges of psychiatric care in the twentieth-first century.

Toward a Machine Learning Predictive-Oriented Approach to Complement Explanatory Modeling. An Application for Evaluating Psychopathological Traits Based on Affective Neurosciences and Phenomenology

“…They are functional states of our organism that motivate actions; they provide orientation in life by making sure that attention moves in a particular direction and attributes specific meanings and values to the world. Recognizing this aspect of emotions allows us to elevate them from mere biological reactions or mental phenomena to fundamental expressions of the "lived body, " representing the moment in which the psychobiological dimensions of experience are articulated (Messas et al, 2018;Sperandeo et al, 2019).…”

Nomothethic Network Psychiatry: A Bottom-Up Approach to Build Data-Driven Disease Models Based on Risk-Resilience, Adverse Outcome Pathways, and Phenome Scores, and to Discover New Biosignature-Based Classifications

“…Descriptive psychopathology or psychiatry focusses on readily observable behaviors and symptoms, rather than on underlying psychoanalytic or organic etiologies. Phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the patients subjective, own lived experiences of selfhood, space, time, body, and mind [14]. Moreover, the taxonomies used to make the diagnosis of psychotic disorders show inadequate reliability validity as for example indicated by significant differences in the diagnoses of DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, ICD-8, ICD-9, and ICD-10 classifications [16,17].…”

Junto e além de Jaspers: intersecções entre abordagens contemporâneas em psicopatologia informada fenomenologicamente

“…(Basso, 2018). One very prominent and continually exposed is the dissatisfaction of the current mainstream psychiatry, as the acknowledgment of an apparent crisis of its own commitments and presuppositions (Messas, Tamelini & Stanghellini, 2018). This psychiatry first guided by a behaviorist and positivist epistemology (influenced by logical positivism) has in the 80s adopted for itselfmainly on the occasion of the DSM-IIIan even stronger physicalist position, highlighted by biological reductionism and classificatory objectivism, all through the borrowed lens of the diagnostic model taken from general medicine (Parnas, Sass & Zahavi, 2013).…”

“…The Phenomenological Movement was, in addition, composed by many other authors, such as Edith Stein, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger; even though all these names are examples of contemporary philosophers, the movement was also built by authors outside the philosophical field, mainly in Psychology and Psychiatry (Spiegelberg, 1972). Names that marked the first half of the 20th century like Karl Jaspers, Eugéne Minkowski, David Katz and Ludwig Binswanger are also highlighted as strong contributors to the body of knowledge in phenomenologically informed psychology and psychiatry (Carel, 2011;Messas, Tamelini, Mancini, & Stanghellini, 2018). Although each of those authors have their theoretical specificities, one could say that the underlying project was to offer a response to a certain physicalist psychopathology and neurology that mainly dominated the field since the 1850s .…”