The purpose of this paper is to analyze silence as a specific experience that is formed on the border between that what is psychotic and that what is creative. Trying to deepen the reflection on the area of silence in our experience I will recall two conceptions: Merleau-Ponty’s and Lacan’s. Both of these authors attempted to go beyond the dichotomy of the subjective and the objective perspective in pursuit of a new definition of the subject. Both of them analyzed cases (...) of mental illness and creativity. Merleau-Ponty focused on the bodily aspects of experience, whereas Lacan focused upon the lingual. However, though the phenomenological and the psychoanalytic approach are not entirely reconcilable, in many points they may turn out to be complementary, especially when brought into particular contexts with Martin Heidegger, a figure each considered their main inspiration. (shrink)

From 1959 until 1969, Heidegger lectured to psychiatrists and psychiatry students at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic and in Zollikon. The transcriptions of these lectures were published as the Zollikon Seminars. In these seminars Heidegger is highly critical of psychoanalysis, because of its causal and objectifying approach to the human being. In general, Heidegger considers it an objectification or even an elimination of the human being to approach a patient from a causal perspective. In our view Heidegger has overlooked (...) the peculiar nature and complexity of psychotherapy and psychiatry, namely that psychiatry is not just a discipline that combines a hermeneutical approach and a natural science approach on a theoretical level, but it also deals with psychopathology in practice. We argue, also referring to Strawson and Gadamer, that in psychiatric practice causal explanation and hermeneutic understanding are no mutually exclusive approaches. We conclude that the encounter of philosophy and psychiatry in matters of causality and motivation could be particularly fruitful when the practical situation is addressed, recognizing the special character of psychopathology. (shrink)

Intersubjectivity is a key concept in phenomenology as well as in psychology and especially in psychotherapy, given the reliance of the therapeutic process on its location in relationship. While psychotherapy encompasses a range of what Owen terms “talking therapies”, this paper focuses mainly on the Freudian model of psychoanalysis and its connection with Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology respectively. Freud’s recognition that symptoms have meaning, and that the methodical disclosing of their meaning needs to be guided by the experience of the (...) patient, accords with the emphasis of phenomenology on empathic attunement to the lived experience of the other. Insofar as the orientation of psychoanalysis towards methodically disclosing meaning gives it a hermeneutic dimension, it is also compatible methodologically with the interpretative mode of phenomenology. While Karlsson identifies seven centrally significant “points of connection” between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, Thompson suggests that “psychoanalysis is already phenomenological in its latency …. Indeed, Freud’s principles of technique make little sense outside a phenomenological context”.Can it thus be claimed that, in the quest for intersubjectivity, sufficient common ground exists for meaningful dialogue between psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and phenomenology in general, and between Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in particular? That is what this paper seeks to explore.The paper proceeds from pointing to the ambiguity of the Freudian mode as simultaneously natural scientific and hermeneutic to exploring the fundamental points of difference and commonality between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and in particular the significance of the role of the unconscious and intentionality in psychoanalysis and phenomenology respectively, as well as the orientation of both towards greater understanding of one’s being in the world. Ultimately, however, the authors conclude that, while the points of commonality would seem conducive to dialogue between the Freudian and the phenomenological in the psychotherapeutic domain, their differences in aims and approach, each shaped by a different view of humankind, continue to obstruct it. The quest for it nevertheless remains ongoing, as demonstrated not only by the academic endeavours of theoreticians such as Owen and Karlsson, but by the contemporary urge of second century psychoanalysis for a theoretically coherent turn away from the Cartesian and towards the authentically intersubjectively relational. (shrink)