René Rosfort

The Person in Between Moods and Affects

In this paper, we consider the nature of two aspects of human emotional experience—moods and affects—in their relation to the concept of the person. We argue for the importance of the concept of the person in an approach to human emotional experience. This paper differentiates between the concepts of minimal self, extended self, and person. Furthermore, it offers a phenomenological proposal to understand the feeling dimension of moods and affects as critical for the differentiation of human emotional experience, and hence an understanding of that experience. By way of conclusion, we opt for a narrative approach to the question of the normative dimension of emotional experience to clarify the intricate relationship between mood and personhood.

Disordered selves or persons with schizophrenia

Purpose of review This study builds on the self-disorder hypothesis of schizophrenia and further develops it by integrating the notion of ‘selfhood’ with that of ‘personhood’. The self-disorder hypothesis brings to light the patients subjective abnormal experiences. What may remain out of focus is the persons attitude towards these anomalous experiences. Recent findings Taking into account the notion of personhood allows for an articulation of the way the suffering person reflectively responds to and makes sense of her troubled selfhood. This approach is conducive to the development of a person-centred dialectical (PCD) model of schizophrenia that is concerned not only with the phenomenological description of troubled selfhood but also with how persons with schizophrenia interact and cope with their abnormal experiences. The principal clinical implication is the development of a two-tier descriptive system including phenomenal assessment of disordered selfhood and appraisal of personal background. Summary The recognition of the patients resources is necessary for effective treatment, as recovery requires not only the reduction of full-blown symptoms but also a change in the patients attitude with respect to her basic abnormal phenomena. The latter involves the persons own effort to make sense of and cope with her vulnerability.

Affective temperament and personal identity.

The complex relationship between temperament and personal identity, and between these and mental disorders, is of critical interest to both philosophy and psychopathology. More than other living creatures, human beings are constituted and characterized by the interplay of their genotype and phenotype. There appears to be an explanatory gap between the almost perfect genetic identity and the individual differences among humans. One reason for this gap is that a human being is a person besides a physiological organism. We propose an outline of a theoretical model that might somewhat mitigate the explanatory discrepancies between physiological mechanisms and individual human emotional experience and behaviour. Arguing for the pervasive nature of human affectivity, i.e., for the assumption that human consciousness and behaviour is characterised by being permeated by affectivity; to envisage the dynamics of emotional experience, we make use of a three-levelled model of human personal identity that differentiates between factors that are simultaneously at work in the constitution of the individual human person: 1) core emotions, 2) affective temperament types/affective character traits, and 3) personhood. These levels are investigated separately in order to respect the methodological diversity among them (neuroscience, psychopathology, and philosophy), but they are eventually brought together in a hermeneutical account of human personhood.

In the Mood for Thought: Feeling and Thinking in Philosophy

For more than a decade, emotions have been a hot topic in philosophy as well as in most other areas of the humanities. While the emotional dimension of thinking, deliberation, and behavior is more closely examined than ever before, rarely is the emotional aspect of philosophy itself the topic of philosophical inquiry. This essay argues that there is much to be gained from an investigation of the emotional aspect of philosophical texts. Drawing on two major figures in history, Descartes and Kant, it examines some of the methodological obstacles to such an investigation in the comtemporary philosophy of emotions, proposing the concept of mood as a key a point of entry into the emotional texture of philosophical thinking. The essay concludes with the suggestion that an examination of the loss of ambivalence and the obdurate quest for answers that characterizes the mood of contemporary philosophy might help explain why the curiosity of so few people outside the narrow circle of professional philosophers is aroused by the discussions going on in academic philosophy today.

The Feeling of Being a Person

We thank Argyris Stringaris, Martin Heinze, Matthew R. Broom, and Havi Carel for their acute and thoughtful commentaries on our paper. The commentaries can be regarded as subtle reflections on our work, and as valuable suggestions for the future development of our theory. They all seem, more or less, to agree with our basic thoughts about the intimate relation between affectivity and personhood. We therefore use this opportunity to clarify some aspects of our theory that have been emphasized in the commentaries. We have chosen to do this in the form of one coherent response divided in three sections, each of which deals with one or two issues raised by the respective commentary. The three sections cover (1) The Affective Core of Being a Person (a response to Heinze), (2) Biology and Heideggerian Being-in-the-World (a response to Broome and Carel), and (3) Enduring Emotions, Values, and the Moody Person (a response to Stringaris). In this way, we hope to give due consideration to some aspects of the single commentaries and, at the same time, to show how their suggestions, in general, could improve our future research. The Affective Core of Being a Person

Jaspers on Feelings and Affective States

The purpose of this chapter is to examine Jaspers’ analysis of emotions and emotional experience in the General Psychopathology (1997/1959, hereafter GP), to try to make sense of his rather ambivalent attitude towards human emotional life, and finally to discuss if these analyses are helpful for understanding troubled human experience and relevant for contemporary clinical practice. The chapter is divided into six sections. First, we introduce our investigation by asking about the relevance of a Jaspersian psychopathology for contemporary psychiatry. Do we need psychopathology at all? And if so, does Jaspers’ psychopathology still have something to teach us today? And what is the relevance of feelings for psychopathology? We then look at the ambivalent role that feelings and emotional experience play in Jaspers’ psychopathology. The third, and most extensive, section is dedicated to an overview of Jaspers’ treatment of feelings and affective states in the GP. With this overview in place, we then try to articulate his understanding of the role emotions play in mental suffering. We do this by integrating his rather fragmentary descriptions and analyses of emotions into the wider context of a psychopathology of emotional experience. In the fifth section, we will venture an explanation of Jaspers’ ambivalent attitude to emotional experience in terms of his reluctance to formulate a systematic theory of human nature. This explanation will allow us, by way of conclusion, to outline how Jaspers’ peculiar attitude towards emotional experience may (or may not) point in the direction of a person-centred psychopathology of emotions.