Chapter 4 - Capturing the Lived Experience

Summary

The interview questions were designed to enable the psychiatrists to reflect on their lived experiences, that is their personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand experience. This standard definition emphasises the subjective knowledge that individuals form through direct encounters, interactions and observations. The authors were particularly interested in learning about how the negotiation between South Asian and British cultures played out in the course of their working lives at the level of the lived experience rather than abstractly. Frantz Fanon’s existential-phenomenology is used as an example of an approach known as ‘critical phenomenology’ understood as a form of politically engaged practice capable of reflecting the concrete conditions of existence. Fanon’s significance within this context is heightened, given his credentials as a psychiatrist and his method of the lived experience as the route to learning about difference. Living through the era of French colonialism, he examined the devastating impact of colonialism and its concomitant effects on the self, on himself, as the colonised but also as the psychiatrist, and had a greater understanding of and empathy with his patients because of their shared experiences. Through powerful phenomenological description, he described his own feelings of being othered and displaced, and how this precarious sense of selfhood had lasting effects on his sense of identity.