The Attempted Murder of a Prostitute.

Abstract

The Attempted Murder oj a Prostitute* by Roland XuhnIT IS ALWAYS MEANINGFUL to present the story of a criminal if we "care infinitely more about his thoughts than his deeds, and again far more about the sources of his thoughts than about the effects of those deeds*' (Friedrich Schiller). But there are men who cannot, themselves, realize either their thoughts or the sources of their thoughts. When such a person commits a crime without any apparent external cause, even our best intentions to understand him cannot solve the riddle. In such cases, psychology often enables us, if not to solve the psychic riddles, at least to throw some light upon them by teaching us to reconstruct the person's external and inner life history, to gain insight into his dream and phantasy life, and to see him within the frame of his predisposition and in interrelation with his family environment. Also, psychology makes use of an understanding description of all the attitudes of a person toward his fellow men, including his doctors. Furthermore, psychology examines him under experimentally simplified conditions and understands him in the terms of diagnostic-clinical psychiatry on the hs^is of classifying criteria which were found by comparing numerous cases with one another.However, it is possible to describe a person independently of any normative concept and, therefore, apart from the distinction between healthy and sick and, as far as this is possible, without passing any judgment. We are here referring to the phenomenologicai method of E. Husserl 1 which,• Translated by ERNEST ANGEL from the original, "Mordversuch eines depressiven Fetischisten und Sodomisten an einer Dime/* Monatsschrift fur Psychiatric und Neurologic,

A Historical Overview of the Phenomenologic Movement

“…What is important is that a phenomenologically based approach has been used successfully in clinical work. Binswanger (1958aBinswanger ( , 1958c, Kuhn (1958), Minkowski (1958), Straus (1958), andvon Gebsattel (1958) all provided excellent examples of this clinical approach. Phenomenological descriptions were used to help therapists begin "seeing the patient as he really is, knowing him in his own reality" rather than "seeing merely a projection of our own theories about him" (p. 3).…”

Human existence (cún zài): What is it? What's in it for us as existential psychotherapists?

“…devoted to the 'totum humanum, the whole man in his ontological scope as self, personality, and person'' (Spiegelberg, 1972, p. 249). In their concern for establishing a science of the whole human being, these four eventually found valuable intellectual company with other Europeans like the biologist Frederick Buytendijk (1961), the neurologist Viktor von Weizsa ¨cker (1940), and psychiatrists Henri Ey (1963=1978), Roland Kuhn (1958), J. H. Van Den Berg (1955), andDieter Wyss (1966) to name just a few. However, it was left to two Swiss psychiatrists, Ludwig Binswanger (1958Binswanger ( , 1963 and Medard Boss (1963Boss ( , 1979, to develop the first systematic existential approaches to psychiatric psychopathology and depth psychotherapy respectively.…”

Kirk Schneider in psychopathology

“…For Klein (1972) Hyper-expansion can also be witnessed in other syndromes such as: hyperactivity, attention-deficit, oppositionality, explosiveness, impulsiveness, and substance abuse associated with autonomic nervous system arousal, e.g. amphetamines and hallucinogens (see American Psychiatric Association, 1980;Binswanger, 1958aBinswanger, , 1958bKantizian, 1985;Kuhn, 1958;Prentky, 1979).…”