Abstract
The phenomenological psychology and psychotherapy, which cannot access the meaning of experience through reflective objectification, must do so by grasping it in its enactment: by grasping the taking shape of lived experience in relation to this or that circumstance, as it actually occurs in everyday life—in different ways for different people. The specifying of what method guides us in grasping the way in which each person prereflectively experiences this or that situation is the cornerstone of this chapter. In the footsteps of Heidegger’s phenomenology, we have referred to this method as formal indication. In order to account for the incompleteness of each person’s being-there, this indication focuses on the intentional involvement without specifying any content. This method, which accompanies the taking shape of other people’s experience of this or that, enables us to study the way in which ipseity relates to the world in different situations, in a way that carries different meanings for different people. The analysis of a clinical case helps further explicate the new method.
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Notes
- 1.
From this perspective it is easy to understand why constructivist therapies in particular—obsessed as they are with the idea of an all-encompassing theory of knowledge—have sought to develop a model for therapeutic change by drawing upon epistemology.
- 2.
All the various forms of training and supervision go in this direction.
- 3.
What deserves a separate mention is mindfulness psychology, in which the therapeutic practice takes place in exactly the opposite way from conventional Western psychotherapies, insofar as treatment occurs through a process of deindividualization—implemented through a meditative practice—rather than through a regaining of the self. Nevertheless, the techniques for transformation are much the same (see Foucault 2013, p. 95).
- 4.
This is like being directly confronted with a past experience.
- 5.
What is meaningful is “primordially living and experiential” (GA 56/57, p. 107).
- 6.
On the other hand, to conceive the dialogic relation between the I and the you, not as something based on the fact of being with the other, but as the cornerstone of the entire social framework—and, as some have suggested, of the therapeutic relationship (Hermans and Hermans-Jansen 2004; Hermans and Gieser 2012)—means refusing to acknowledge the defining character of ipseity, which essentially coincides with being with the other, before and beyond any I and you. In other words, ipseity does not become a being with the other after one has understood that it exists in the presence of another entity that shares its disclosing nature; rather, ipseity always coincides with being together with the other. The fundamental fallacy of the dialogic approach to psychotherapy, which undermines its entire conceptual framework, lies in the fact that it reduces the occurrence of experience, which is always mine, to I-ness. In this case, the I-you dialogue, the we, takes shape as the go-between for two encapsulated subjectivities that are inherently opposed to each other: two self-contained entities of which we know nothing, including their possible mutual relation.
- 7.
Janet was the first to realize—albeit only in relation to hysterical phenomena—that symptoms are produced through the establishment of a mechanism between two levels that continue to engender it by remaining separate.
- 8.
To simply dismiss incongruities of this sort as self-deception is to assume that the patient is implementing a maneuver (negation or rationalization) to avoid facing the element of truth in her account, as opposed to examining this personal history from the perspective of how the patient relates to her own past.
- 9.
Consequently, the analysis of meaningfulness, which is to say of how the desk is understood by each person, coincides with the study of the access to it, which is achieved by re-enacting it.
- 10.
Etymologically, “symptom” describes a fact that coincides—and occurs together with—another fact that is its effect or marker.
- 11.
It is on the basis of this that psychopathology structures itself as a science.
- 12.
Our aim was to grasp the connection between normalcy and psychopathology by showing how the various neurotic syndromes may be traced back to the fossilization of modes of experiencing.
- 13.
In Kraepelinian biological psychiatry, this perspective is pushed so far that symptomatology is reduced to chromosomic determinism.
- 14.
The third movement—the sense of reference—corresponds to the passion for healing.
- 15.
The problem, then, concerns theorein and its primacy, and even the deconstruction of Descartes and Husserl (GA 17)—polemically emphasized by Crowell—cannot be grasped if not in the light of formal indication.
- 16.
“Having the situation of understanding and the passion for questioning” is for Kisiel (1993) the condition that structures the decision to philosophize (p. 234).
- 17.
As previously emphasized (Chap. 4), ipseity is distinguished, not just by a sense of content, of enactment, and of reference but also by a sense of temporal cohesion (Zeitigungssinn).
- 18.
Questio mihi factus sum: Augustine, Confess. 4, 4, 9.
- 19.
This is no way conflicts with the fact that behind the attack on writing—and those who by using it seem to be omniscient but are in fact ignorant for the most part—there lies the major concern of the dialogue, namely, the vindication of the philosophical life against a life that merely seeks its (of writing) effects.
- 20.
In the Epicurean milieu to which Philodemus belonged, parrhesia was transmitted from master to disciple and practiced in a group setting, in the presence of an overseer (Foucault 2001).
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Arciero, G., Bondolfi, G., Mazzola, V. (2018). Personal Stories and Psychotherapy. In: The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78087-0_6
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