Kevin Aho

Medicalizing Mental Health: A Phenomenological Alternative

With the increasingly close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) there has been a growing tendency in the mental health professions to interpret everyday emotional suffering and behavior as a medical condition that can be treated with a particular drug. In this paper, I suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology is uniquely suited to challenge the core assumptions of medicalization by expanding psychiatry’s narrow conception of the self as an enclosed, biological individual and recognizing the ways in which our experience of things—including mental illness—is shaped by the socio-historical situation in which we grow. Informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, psychiatry’s first priority is to suspend the prejudices that come with being a medical doctor in order to hear what the patient is saying. To this end, psychiatry can begin to understand the patient not as a static, material body with a clearly defined brain dysfunction but as an unfolding, situated existence already involved in an irreducibly complex social world, an involvement that allows the patient to experience, feel, and make sense of their emotional suffering.

The Missing Dialogue between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: On the Importance of the Zollikon Seminars

Heidegger’s failure to discuss ‘the body’ in Being and Time has generated a cottage industry of criticism. In his recently translated Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger provides a response to the critics by offering a thematic account of the body that is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article, I draw on the parallels between these two texts in order to see how Heidegger’s neglect of the body affects his early project of fundamental ontology and to determine whether or not an account of the body is necessary to complete the project. I defend Heidegger by suggesting that any analysis of the body is ‘ontic’ or regional and is made possible only on the basis of Dasein, understood as a public ‘clearing’ (Lichtung) or ‘there’ (Da) of intelligibility that determines in advance the way things emerge-into-presence as the kinds of things that they are. Heidegger’s core concern in Being and Time is to unearth the essential, ‘ontological-existential’, structures of Dasein that make it possible for us to begin regional investigations into the problem of the body in the first place.

Depression and embodiment: phenomenological reflections on motility, affectivity, and transcendence

This paper integrates personal narratives with the methods of phenomenology in order to draw some general conclusions about ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be depressed. The analysis has three parts. First, it explores the ways in which depression disrupts everyday experiences of spatial orientation and motility. This disruption makes it difficult for the person to move and perform basic functional tasks, resulting in a collapse or contraction of the life-world. Second, it illustrates how depression creates a situational atmosphere of emotional indifference that reduces the person’s ability to qualitatively distinguish what matters in his or her life because nothing stands out as significant or important anymore. In this regard, depression is distinct from other feelings because it is not directed towards particular objects or situations but to the world as a whole. Finally, the paper examines how depression diminishes the possibility for ‘self-creation’ or ‘self-making’. Restricted by the illness, depression becomes something of a destiny, preventing the person from being open and free to access a range of alternative self-interpretations, identities, and possible ways of being-in-the-world.

Acceleration and Time Pathologies

In his Contributions to Philosophy, Martin Heidegger (1999) introduces ‘acceleration’ as one of the three symptoms – along with ‘calculation’ and the ‘outbreak of massiveness’ – of our technological way of ‘being-in-the-world’. In this article, I unpack the relationship between these symptoms and draw a twofold conclusion. First, interpreting acceleration in terms of time pathologies, I suggest the self is becoming increasingly fragmented and emotionally overwhelmed from chronic sensory arousal and time pressure. This experience makes it difficult for us to qualitatively distinguish what matters to us in our everyday lives, resulting in a pervasive cultural mood of indifference, what Heidegger (1995) calls ‘profound boredom’. Second, by drawing on Heideggers hermeneutic method, I argue that the practice of mainstream psychology, by adopting the reductive methodology of the empirical sciences, largely ignores our accelerated socio-historical situation, resulting in therapeutic models that have a tendency to construct and perpetuate the very pathologies the psychologist is seeking to treat.

Heidegger, ontological death, and the healing professions

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of ‘ontological death’ and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger’s conception of ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability.

A Hermeneutics of the Body and Place in Health and Illness

This essay explores the ways in which hermeneutic philosophy has shaped current research on the body. Using the experience of health and illness to frame the discussion and drawing on major figures such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans Georg-Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger as well as a number of contemporary theorists, the aim of the essay is to show how hermeneutics challenges core naturalistic assumptions we have about the body by bringing our attention to the situated place of the body as it is lived. By focusing on the ‘lived-body’ (Leib) rather than the ‘corporeal body’ (Korper), hermeneutics illuminates the tacit, situated understanding we have of the world, how the experience of illness can shatter this understanding and transform our self-interpretations, and the extent to which our bodies and their various ailments make sense to us only through the public meanings we give to them.

Guignon on Self-Surrender and Homelessness in Dostoevsky and Heidegger

Charles Guignon’s work on Dostoevsky and much of his writing on Heidegger addresses the experience of homelessness and how it flows out of the modern configuration of the self. Using Guignon’s work as a point of reference, this paper draw connections between Dostoevsky and Heidegger regarding their critique of the modern self. The aim is to show how both thinkers point to the importance of recovering the indigenous values of a homeland for a sense of belongingness and moral orientation. For Dostoevsky this involves retrieving the values of the Eastern Church and the Greek notion of kenosis (‘self-emptying’) that can release us from selfishness and pride so that we can perform selfless acts of love in the image of Christ. And, although his conception of historical recovery is more nuanced and largely stripped of its religious context, there is an analogous theme found in Heidegger’s later writings on Gelassenheit (‘letting-be’). Both notions cultivate an attitude of shared humility and moral rootedness and can serve as a powerful corrective to the uprooted egoism that prevails today.

Heidegger and Silence

Abstract This short essay offers a critical overview of David Nowell Smiths book Sounding/Silence, focusing on, what the author calls, the “ontologization of poetry” as a way to grasp Heideggers critique of traditional aesthetics and the novel claim that the human body is already implicated in Heideggers account of language and poetry. To this end, there is a brief discussion of Heideggers controversial views on the human/animal relation, the connection between poetry and thinking, and the value of Heideggers poetics for future scholarship in the area.