Abstract
Today, there is a considerable interest in phenomenology within psychiatric academic communities as well as among clinical practitioners; as a result, a growing number of institutions demonstrate their commitment to phenomenology as a privileged speculative companion. The main focus of existing teaching programs in phenomenology is usually placed on psychopathological issues and on describing the experience of mental illness from a non-naturalistic and person-centered perspective. In this article, I argue that phenomenological training should also be focused on the role of the psychiatrist in providing such a phenomenologically informed patient-centered approach. In this perspective, phenomenological interviews such as EASE, EAWE and EAFI appear to be a particularly relevant form of training, as they allow the trainee to engage actively in the learning process. To focus on the person of the psychiatrist allows, however, to reconsider the meaning of the clinician’s neutrality, advocated by the authors of the phenomenological interviews. The attitude produced by adopting the phenomenological approach should instead be described as a particular reflective attitude which allows for paying attention to the embodied dimension of experience. This attitude differs from both the neutrality associated with the objectivity of classic psychiatry, and the neutrality to which a psychoanalyst strives. By taking into account embodied awareness as characteristic of phenomenological attitude, one then may address, through training, the specifics of phenomenological practice, such as its unstable and laborious nature, its integration in the lived experience, and the challenge that it poses to the psychiatrist’s scientific background.
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Notes
It would, however, be one-sided to consider the challenges of anchoring phenomenology in the psychiatric field as depending exclusively on the resistance of the latter. Phenomenologists are also often reluctant to the idea of applying the phenomenological method in an empirical field. For instance, the thesis of complementarity between psychiatry, cognitive sciences and phenomenology, that would demand a naturalization of phenomenology, remains a controversial issue (Gallagher, 2012; Petitot et al., 2000); at the same time the fact that, in order to engage in the dialogue with psychiatry, phenomenology has to be ready, at least temporarily, to accept psychiatric nomenclature, may be seen as incompatible with some basic principles of the phenomenological approach (Sholokhova et al., 2021).
For a more detailed discussion on neutrality in psychiatry and psychoanalysis see Sholokhova, 2019.
For the concept of awareness, I draw mostly on the work of Depraz (2003).
This point was recently risen by Zahavi (2019).
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Sholokhova, S. Phenomenological interviews in learning and teaching phenomenological approach in psychiatry. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 121–136 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09798-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09798-z