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18 - Who Is the Psychiatric Subject?

from Section 6

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2020

By
Shaun Gallagher
Edited by
Kenneth S. Kendler ,
Josef Parnas  and
Peter Zachar
Kenneth S. Kendler
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University
Josef Parnas
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
Peter Zachar
Affiliation:
Auburn University, Montgomery
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Summary

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.

Keywords

phenomenologyselfself-patternexplanatory levelssymptomatology
Type
Chapter
Information
Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
 , pp. 228 - 232
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

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