Edited by Thomas Fuchs, Thiemo Breyer, Boris Wandruszka, Stefano Micali
Phenomenology can be regarded as the basic science of subjective experience. It examines its central structures, especially intentionality, corporeality, temporality and intersubjectivity, in order to arrive at insights into the basic forms of human experience in health and illness. Going beyond the subject/object divide, their attention is focused on the indissoluble connection between subjectivity and experience of the world. For psychiatry, this means that being mentally ill is neither seen as a purely objective event that can be localised in the brain nor attributed to a hidden “inner space” of the psychic. Rather, mental illness manifests itself in experience as well as in bodily appearance and behaviour, in the temporality of life, in relationships to others, in short: in the entire being-in-the-world of the sick person.
The DGAP series presents research contributions in which phenomenological approaches are further developed in anthropology, psychiatry and psychotherapy.
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