Who Is the Psychiatric Subject?

Abstract

This commentary on Parnas and Zandersen reinforces their view about scientific reductionism and their insistence on the importance of a phenomenology of the subjective life for diagnosis and explanation. This “phenomenal ontology” includes experiential structures that involve embodiment, temporality, intentionality, selfhood, and intersubjectivity. A phenomenological account of such factors can counter the lack of specificity about self-related phenomena in the DSM. The vignettes they provide point to a rich complexity in the subject’s situation involving a variety of different dimensions or variables related to the self, and disruptions or anomalies across a pattern of aspects, and not just with respect to the minimal level of experience. The full picture of the self, implicit in the clinical vignettes, involves the recognition of a dynamically structured self-pattern of the many variables that make up one’s life. Such a focus on a self-pattern, however, undermines thinking in terms of explanatory levels.

Publication Title

Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology Cross Disciplinary Perspectives

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS