James M. Fielding

The Anatomy of the Image: Toward an Applied Onto-Psychiatry

Biomedical software ontologies provide a means for the representation of facts gathered through biomedical research and clinical observation. At the foundation of good software ontology design lays a sound philosophical realism that supplies the basic framework required to support the computable management of this information correctly and consistently. In numerous biomedical subdomains (such as anatomy, disease classification, or functional genomics), a good degree of success has been achieved through the realist approach. In the field of psychiatry, however, the analytic tools of ontological realism are challenged to account for subjective mental experiences that typically lay beyond their scope. Although psychiatric symptoms, such as delusions, hallucinations, or memory loss, may be too ethereal to account for in terms of a realist ontology, by focusing on some psychiatric signs, such as images of the human brain (which are in themselves subject to ontological analysis), we may be able to make some in-roads toward an application ontology of the psychiatric domain. In this paper, via the ontological framework of Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, we discuss the differences between the ontology of the body and the ontology of the image, and apply the subsequent image-ontology framework to the domain of neuroimaging. We aim to demonstrate how such an ontology may lead to the perspicuous structuring of clinical information in psychiatry and the benefits application ontologies afford may subsequently be attained within a portion of this particularly difficult domain.

Robert Musil's Symptomatology: Oswald Spengler and the Clinical Picture of Society

In his essays from the early 1920s, Robert Musil repeatedly called the behavior and modes of thinking prevailing in postwar society “symptoms.” Moreover, he claimed that the same conditions that led to World War I were still present after the war. He argued that a process of working through these conditions and the prevailing symptoms was required to avoid another outbreak of large-scale destruction. In the essay “Geist und Erfahrung,” Musil found Oswald Spengler representative of a symptomatic manner of thinking. However, he also showed indecision about how to relate to the symptoms he found in Spenglers writing. Besides describing the problems Musil encountered when clarifying the “symptomatic” style of Spengler, this essay clarifies the “clinical picture” of society Musil repeatedly made throughout his life, which is crucial to understanding what he wanted to achieve with Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.