Phenomenology and Psychopathology

As the systematic project of investigating the structures of subjective experience, phenomenology may also be considered the foundational science for psychopathology. Though it methodically suspends any assumptions about causal explanation, it provides a rich framework for the analysis of subjectivity and its disturbances in mental disorders, thus also leading to testable hypotheses about the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Whereas the first movement of phenomenological and existential psychiatry – mainly derived from European, particularly German and French sources – came to a certain conclusion in the 1970s (marked by Spiegelberg’s synopsis in 1972), the last two decades have seen an international revival of phenomenological psychopathology which also entered into a constructive dialogue with cognitive neuroscience (Parnas and Bovet 1995; Mishara et al. 1998; Fuchs 2002a). Present phenomenological psychopathology has gained new ground by emphasizing the roots of mental illness in the patients’ prereflective experience. Drawing on the advances of phenomenological research in general, it relates psychopathology to the basic structures of consciousness such as self-awareness, embodiment, spatiality, temporality, intentionality, and intersubjectivity. In order to investigate these dimensions, the phenomenologist will start with questions such as: