Abstract
This chapter discusses Stein’s understanding of mental health and mental illness in order to contribute to phenomenologically determine the formal object of psychiatry. It first outlines and defends Stein’s understanding of the psyche as an element of psycho-physical beings constituted from experiences marked by life power. Then it highlights three functions of the psychic mechanism that support mental health and which are affected in mental illness: vitality, rationality and trust. Finally the various ways in which psychic contagion can instigate and aggravate mental illness are discussed. It is argued that psychic causality is causing both the disturbances studied by psychiatry and the state of equilibrium its range of healing practices pursue and that thus the dysfunctional psyche, i.e. the psyche that does not support meaningful experiencing, is the formal object of psychiatry.
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Notes
- 1.
The German title Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften is literally translated as ‘contributions towards the philosophical foundation of psychology and the humanities’. The work will be referred to in the following as PPH. The foreword starts: ‘The following investigations undertake to penetrate into the essence of sentient reality and of the mind from various sides, and thereby to secure the groundwork for a definition of psychology and the humanities that will fit the facts.’ CWES 7, 2000, 1. An earlier version of this paper has been published in German in M. Lebech and H.-B. Gerl-Falkovitz, 2017, under the title: ‘Psychische Gesundheit und Krankheit bei Edith Stein ’, pp. 188–202.
- 2.
References are given to the Edith Stein Gesamtsausgabe (ESGA) and to the Collected Works of Edith Stein (CWES). If two sets of page numbers are given, the page numbers in square brackets refer to the German text of Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe (ESGA). Other abbreviations used:
PE = On the Problem of Empathy, trans. by W. Stein, 3rd revised edition. Dordrecht: Springer 1989.
PPH = Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, translated by M. C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki. Washington, DC: ICS Publications 2000.
- 3.
- 4.
Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung des Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften/Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities I: Psychische Kausalität/Psychic Causality.
- 5.
Stein in fact claims that psychic causality is experientially prior to physical causality, and that the latter in its identification therefore is dependent on the former (PPH: 3–6). An assessment of this and of its significant consequences would be a topic for another paper. For our purposes we note that an understanding of psychic events as being caused by physical causality depends on the understanding of the role psychic causality plays in them: it is not possible to attribute a physical cause to a psychic event without identifying the psychic event as such. The analysis of the phenomenon of psychic causality with which Stein is concerned can thus not be dispensed with either by a naturalist psychology and psychiatry .
- 6.
‘These considerations lead us to the conclusion that the spiritual subject is essentially subject to rational laws and that its experiences are intelligibly related’ (PE: 97). The World Health Organisation gives the following definition of human wellness, of which mental health is an aspect (in Strengthening mental health promotion, Geneva, WHO 2001, Fact Sheet, no 220): human wellness ‘in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community .’ I take this characterisation to be very close to the one proposed above.
- 7.
Stein’s distinction between mental derangement and psychic illness proper is discussed in Sect. 3 below. If one were to count derangement in her sense as mental illness, one would have to say mental illness would be a historical event to the extent that it is motivated.
- 8.
‘Faced with the choice whether to save her brother, his friend, and herself through lies and deceit or to abandon all of them to ruin, she first believes that she must chose the “lesser evil.” But her pure soul is not able to bear untruthfulness and breach of trust; she defends herself against these as does a healthy nature against germs of fatal disease.’ Spirituality of the Christian Woman’ in Woman, transl. F.M. Oben, CWES vol. II, 91. The brother, having murdered their mother, is also characterised as ‘defiled by matricide, agonized by remorse to the point of madness.’ Ibid.
- 9.
Die Frau, ESGA 13:182.
- 10.
Ibid: ‚Krankheit unserer Zeit‘ xii, 7, 13, 74, 79, 245. ‘unseres Volkes’ 7: Iphigenia withstands madness 83, illnesses are of the whole human being 100, comes from original sin 168, 214. Edith Stein : Bildung und Entfaltung der Individualität, ESGA 16: Social illness 23; illnesses of our times 124. Woman CWES 2 is not an accurate reflection of ESGA 13. The latter includes more material and arranges it chronologically. CWES 2 is a translation of a previous edition, Edith Steins Werke (ESW) vol. V.
- 11.
‘Woman’s Value in National Life’ in Woman, CWES vol. II, 259–60 [7].
- 12.
Social causality seems to be the formal object of the social sciences. It would be the topic of another paper to analyse PPH’s contribution towards its clarification.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
See note 18.
- 16.
PPH: 74: ‘a consciousness is conceivable in which the entire “conditioning” stratum would be missing, a consciousness that would unfold without any fluctuation of “aliveness” and that would also allow acts to devolve out of itself.’
- 17.
‘Obviously we have to distinguish between “natural” [“natürliches”] life and life flowing in from without, which we call “mental” since it is acquired in mental acts. Yet even without this “influx”, it seems you have to separate a “sensory” [“sinnliches”] and a “mental” [“geistiges”] stratum, and correspondingly a sensory and a mental lifepower, as different roots of the psyche. With sensory lifepower, the psyche appears to be sunk into the physis: into bodiliness and, moreover, by means of bodiliness into material nature. [...] Mental lifepower appears to be determined by sensory lifepower: as a rule mental vigour also fades along with bodily vigour. Yet aside from that, mental lifepower remains open to influxes from the object world and through them can become capable of achievements which don’t accord with the state of sensory lifepower.’ (PPH: 81 [71])
- 18.
Note that the translator translates ‘psychisch’ with ‘sentient’.
- 19.
‘Rationally, one can will only the possible. But there are irrational people who do not care whether what they have recognised as valuable is realisable or not. They will it for its value alone, attempting to make the impossible possible. Pathological psychic life indicates that what is contradictory to rational laws is really possible for many people. We call this mental derangement. Moreover, psychic lawfulness can here be completely intact. On the other hand, in some psychic illnesses rational laws of the spirit remain completely intact, for example in anaesthesia, aphasia, etc. We recognise a radical difference between spiritual and psychic anomalies. In cases of the second kind, the intelligibility of foreign psychic life is completely undisturbed; we must only empathise changed causal relationships. However, in mental illness we can no longer understand because we can only empathise a causal sequence separately and not a meaningful proceeding of experiences. Finally, there is still a series of pathological cases in which neither the psychic mechanism nor rational lawfulness seems to be severed. Rather, these cases are experiential modifications of the frame of rational laws, for example, depression following a catastrophic event. Not only is the portion of the psychic life spared by the illness intelligible here, but also the pathological symptom itself.’ PE: 97.
- 20.
PPH: I, IV.
- 21.
‘Anxiety, to be sure, is under ordinary circumstances not the dominant mood of human life. It overshadows everything else only under pathological conditions, while normally we go through life almost as securely as if we had a really firm grip on our existence.’ (Finite and Eternal Being, CWES 9: 59/ Endliches und ewiges Sein, ESGA 11–12: 59). See also Stein’s treatment of Heidegger’s concept of anguish in the appendix to Finite and Eternal Being, at the present available in English translation only in a separate translation (Lebech 2007).
- 22.
A study of how these three aspects are affected in the various psychiatric diagnoses would be too involved for the present study, which only aims to outline the way the psychic mechanism is compromised in mental illness in general.
- 23.
PPH: 182–6. Stein concludes her discussion of the three ways in which instinctive imitation operates with the following consideration: ‘The foregoing considerations have taught us that there is such a thing as an impact of one sentient individual upon another [even] when no mental functioning of any kind is in play. What this makes possible is a modification of the behaviour of one individual under the influence of another, a conformity in behaviour of a series of individuals who mutually influence one another, and finally an intermeshing of functionalities of different individuals which serves objectively one purpose. What is not possible without mental activation is any stance-taking of the individuals to one another, any consensus or any methodical cooperation with it, and finally any collective behaviour in the genuine sense. The collectivity of behaviour includes an experiencing as a collective experiencing: and this “experiencing as” is itself a mental functioning.’ (PPH: 187).
- 24.
‘Die Persönlichkeit ist aber nicht auf den Leib beschränkt und auch nicht so an ihn gebunden, daß an allem, woran der Leib beteiligt ist, auch die Persönlichkeit beteiligt sein müßte. Nehmen wir das Phänomen der „Besessenheit“: wenn ein Mönch in der Kirche zu toben und den Heiligtümern zu fluchen beginnt, so werden diese Äußerungen von den Gläubigen nicht ihm, sondern dem Teufel zugeschrieben, der von ihm Besitz ergriffen hat. Daß es derselbe Leib ist, mit dem man es zu tun hat, besagt noch nicht, daß die handelnde Persönlichkeit dieselbe ist. Diese bekommt man also mit Hilfe der Raum- und Zeitstelle, die den Leib bestimmen, nicht zu fassen. Wer das Beispiel nicht schlagend findet, weil er nicht an den Teufel glaubt, den möchten wir an die Fälle erinnern, wo man von „Unzurechnungsfähigkeit“ spricht. Ob man die Handlungen eines Trunkenen oder Geisteskranken einem bösen Geist zuschreibt oder auf einen anormalen Zustand zurückführt – auf jeden Fall nimmt man an, daß die Persönlichkeit des Menschen an seinem Verhalten nicht beteiligt ist. Und damit ist zugegeben, worauf es uns ankommt: daß die Individualität einer Person auf andere Weise als durch die Raum- und Zeitstelle ihres Leibes bestimmt werden muß.’ Einführung in der Philosophie, ESGA 8: 203. The translation of Einführung is under preparation by Antonio Calcagno.
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Lebech, M. (2017). Stein’s Understanding of Mental Health and Mental Illness. In: Magrì, E., Moran, D. (eds) Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71096-9_6
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