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DIFFERENT EXISTENCE
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
- GenresPsychologyPhilosophy
141 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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April 10, 2016
It is a light and engaging read, an introduction to phenomenological psychopathology, but it can be read by anyone as it is really a work on the all-important subject of mental health with implications which anyone of us (including the healthy person) can take away.
The book mostly revolves around the example case of a single psychiatric patient, about whom, the author tells us, ‘I meet him in every one of my patients'[4]. Overall, instead of laying out a ‘theory’ the book centres on this central one, and other examples. This is in accordance with the phenomenological method itself, which is mostly concerned with direct descriptions rather than with how the world appears ‘on a second thought’.
Before anything particular is said on the phenomenological method in psychopathology, the patient’s story is narrated roughly in the way the patient tells it. Van den Berg groups his complaints into four categories (really they are all interconnected) – what is the world the patient lives in? what is his bodily /health condition? what are his relations with other people? what are his views on his past and future?
All this is put forward as the patient says it, without any interpretation. (We learn, for example, that the patient fears that the houses on the street are about to fall over him; that he feels that his heart might stop working; that he avoids contact with others whom he perceives mostly as wooden puppets; that he hates his past.) Each psychiatric patient would have complaints relating to all or most of these groups (world, body, others, time).
Then van den Berg proceeds to suggests what would a standard, non-phenomenological approach to understanding these complaints look like. Most of us would be inclined to say that the patient’s claims are false, that he is simply wrong/mistaken about matters of fact about the world (or about his body, people around him, his past). The buildings are not in reality about to fall down; the doctors say his body is in perfect health; etc – if only he could understand this, and see things in their true light! But there is no point in trying to convince the patient that he is wrong about certain matters of fact, says the author. Not only because this approach is not going to work in curing the patient, but more importantly, because the patient is in an important sense right. He is right about his claims. He really lives in a world in which houses are about to fall down. This world is the reality for the patient. There isn’t a mental illness which then causes the houses seem unstable; it is the unstability of the houses that is the illness itself; there is no better way for the patient to describe his mental illness than the way he does it – in describing his reality, his world, in which the houses are about to fall down. A realization of the reality of the patient’s claims is a fundamental trait of the phenomenological approach to psychopathology.
Other approaches would instead speak of mechanisms like projection, conversion, transference, or mythicizing, in order to explain the patient’s complaints. These mechanisms are modelled more or less from the physical sciences; their aim is to explain, to divide into fundamental elements, and then to understand how one element causes another. In psychology, however, such an approach misses something important – namely, that one’s psychic life is a totality, not a structure of elements. Everything is inter-connected. A recourse to phenomena like projection, etc, is ultimately not much more helpful in curing or understanding the patient than it would be to point him to or to produce a diagram of his brain.
Take for example projection. A standard approach to explaining the patient’s complaints about the falling houses would be to say that the patient perhaps feels insecure, and then projects this feeling to the world around him. This implies, as van den Berg puts it, a feeling being detached from its original object, then abstracted, and then attached to an ‘objective’ world out there; a world in which the houses in the street are ‘in fact’ quite stable. But this doesn’t ring true for van den Berg, not the least because he doesn’t believe that feelings can exist in abstract, not being directed at anything. Perhaps most importantly, because we humans don’t inhabit an ‘objective’ world at all. Our world is fundamentally subjective, a world in which objects have meanings and purpose.
Thus, in a wonderful example van den Berg gives, when observing a bottle of wine we’ve prepared for the visit of a friend later tonight, what we see is not a green bottle with a white label. Of course we do see a green bottle and a while label, etc, but we also see anticipation; the bottle feels to us in a certain way. Later, when the friend has called to tell us that he actually won’t be able to make it tonight, when glancing at the bottle we can’t help but feel disappointment. Of course, the bottle itself hasn’t changed – the green glass, the white label, are physically, objectively, the same. But for us the bottle has changed. It now carries different meanings.
Both for the sound person and the psychiatric patient, the world inhabited is not an objective world of physical science. The things in the world have meanings, carry certain feelings, etc. Everything is interwoven. When I stop reading the book I’m reading and glance at the bottle and feel disappointed, it won’t do to tell me that there is in fact nothing disappointing about the bottle itself. Similarly perhaps it won’t do to tell the psychiatric patient that there is nothing wrong with the houses themselves. He might know all the physical evidence that the buildings are stable. It doesn’t change the fact that they feel in a certain way – in his case, as if they are about to fall down.
Van den Berg treats the ‘unconscious’ in a more or less similar manner to projection and the other mechanisms mentioned above. While he doesn’t deny that often things happen in our life that we are not explicitly conscious of, he isn’t very fond of the unconscious used as a mechanism for explanation of the patient’s complaints. The phenomenological approach denies the existence of separate ‘layers’ in the person. It is interested in the life, in the reality of the patient.
Perhaps most interesting and revealing of all points (although they are all interwoven) I found the relationship van den Berg draws between loneliness and mental illness. In fact he calls psychopathology ‘the science of loneliness and isolation’. In a revealing paragraph, he says:
This reveals what is missing in the theories underlying the four mechanisms mentioned above. With these terms, ‘the distinction between healthy and mentally ill person is entirely lost'[104]. We all project, convert, transfer, and mythicize, but ‘the healthy person will discover in his healthy fellowmen the selfsame, or more or less the same, conversions, projections, transferences, and distortions of memory as he himself has, whereas the mentally ill person is alone with his mental mechanisms'[105].
This point is further elaborated in the discussion of the nature of hallucinations and delusions that follows. Van den Berg is not a fan of understanding hallucinations as something gone wrong, or broken, in the ‘connection’ between the person and reality. Hallucinations are the person’s reality. Hallucinated objects are even more real to the patient than everyday objects are for the not lonely. And even healthy person ‘subjected to complete isolation hallucinates in a short while. Sooner or later, the lonely person will create his own objects'[107]. Thus, the patient’s ‘hallucinations, his unapproachability and the fact that he cannot be understood are all one and the same thing: his illness'[108]. Hallucinations and delusions are not merely the consequence of a condition of loneliness, they are also the condition itself. Everything is related to everything else.
The book also has other very interesting things to say, for example on the way we perceive time or change; but this is not an exhaustive summary as I feel I will have to reread those parts again before being able to summarize them well. And as with everything in phenomenology, the ideas are for the most part not the sort of things that you can dissect easily, and put down on paper in A.B.C, or for that matter, summarize very successfully. This isn’t to say that the book isn’t written very clearly – the ideas in the book are conveyed mostly in examples, and I also loved the style of writing. It is a relatively short read as well, overall I recommend.
[this review is from my blog: https://philoreview.wordpress.com/201...]
The book mostly revolves around the example case of a single psychiatric patient, about whom, the author tells us, ‘I meet him in every one of my patients'[4]. Overall, instead of laying out a ‘theory’ the book centres on this central one, and other examples. This is in accordance with the phenomenological method itself, which is mostly concerned with direct descriptions rather than with how the world appears ‘on a second thought’.
Before anything particular is said on the phenomenological method in psychopathology, the patient’s story is narrated roughly in the way the patient tells it. Van den Berg groups his complaints into four categories (really they are all interconnected) – what is the world the patient lives in? what is his bodily /health condition? what are his relations with other people? what are his views on his past and future?
All this is put forward as the patient says it, without any interpretation. (We learn, for example, that the patient fears that the houses on the street are about to fall over him; that he feels that his heart might stop working; that he avoids contact with others whom he perceives mostly as wooden puppets; that he hates his past.) Each psychiatric patient would have complaints relating to all or most of these groups (world, body, others, time).
Then van den Berg proceeds to suggests what would a standard, non-phenomenological approach to understanding these complaints look like. Most of us would be inclined to say that the patient’s claims are false, that he is simply wrong/mistaken about matters of fact about the world (or about his body, people around him, his past). The buildings are not in reality about to fall down; the doctors say his body is in perfect health; etc – if only he could understand this, and see things in their true light! But there is no point in trying to convince the patient that he is wrong about certain matters of fact, says the author. Not only because this approach is not going to work in curing the patient, but more importantly, because the patient is in an important sense right. He is right about his claims. He really lives in a world in which houses are about to fall down. This world is the reality for the patient. There isn’t a mental illness which then causes the houses seem unstable; it is the unstability of the houses that is the illness itself; there is no better way for the patient to describe his mental illness than the way he does it – in describing his reality, his world, in which the houses are about to fall down. A realization of the reality of the patient’s claims is a fundamental trait of the phenomenological approach to psychopathology.
Other approaches would instead speak of mechanisms like projection, conversion, transference, or mythicizing, in order to explain the patient’s complaints. These mechanisms are modelled more or less from the physical sciences; their aim is to explain, to divide into fundamental elements, and then to understand how one element causes another. In psychology, however, such an approach misses something important – namely, that one’s psychic life is a totality, not a structure of elements. Everything is inter-connected. A recourse to phenomena like projection, etc, is ultimately not much more helpful in curing or understanding the patient than it would be to point him to or to produce a diagram of his brain.
Take for example projection. A standard approach to explaining the patient’s complaints about the falling houses would be to say that the patient perhaps feels insecure, and then projects this feeling to the world around him. This implies, as van den Berg puts it, a feeling being detached from its original object, then abstracted, and then attached to an ‘objective’ world out there; a world in which the houses in the street are ‘in fact’ quite stable. But this doesn’t ring true for van den Berg, not the least because he doesn’t believe that feelings can exist in abstract, not being directed at anything. Perhaps most importantly, because we humans don’t inhabit an ‘objective’ world at all. Our world is fundamentally subjective, a world in which objects have meanings and purpose.
Thus, in a wonderful example van den Berg gives, when observing a bottle of wine we’ve prepared for the visit of a friend later tonight, what we see is not a green bottle with a white label. Of course we do see a green bottle and a while label, etc, but we also see anticipation; the bottle feels to us in a certain way. Later, when the friend has called to tell us that he actually won’t be able to make it tonight, when glancing at the bottle we can’t help but feel disappointment. Of course, the bottle itself hasn’t changed – the green glass, the white label, are physically, objectively, the same. But for us the bottle has changed. It now carries different meanings.
Both for the sound person and the psychiatric patient, the world inhabited is not an objective world of physical science. The things in the world have meanings, carry certain feelings, etc. Everything is interwoven. When I stop reading the book I’m reading and glance at the bottle and feel disappointed, it won’t do to tell me that there is in fact nothing disappointing about the bottle itself. Similarly perhaps it won’t do to tell the psychiatric patient that there is nothing wrong with the houses themselves. He might know all the physical evidence that the buildings are stable. It doesn’t change the fact that they feel in a certain way – in his case, as if they are about to fall down.
Van den Berg treats the ‘unconscious’ in a more or less similar manner to projection and the other mechanisms mentioned above. While he doesn’t deny that often things happen in our life that we are not explicitly conscious of, he isn’t very fond of the unconscious used as a mechanism for explanation of the patient’s complaints. The phenomenological approach denies the existence of separate ‘layers’ in the person. It is interested in the life, in the reality of the patient.
Perhaps most interesting and revealing of all points (although they are all interwoven) I found the relationship van den Berg draws between loneliness and mental illness. In fact he calls psychopathology ‘the science of loneliness and isolation’. In a revealing paragraph, he says:
The psychiatric patient is alone. He has few relationships or perhaps no relationships at all. He lives in isolation. He feels lonely. He may even dread an interview with another person. At times, conversation with him is impossible. He is somewhat strange; sometimes he is enigmatic and he may, on rare occasions, be even unfathomable. The variations are endless but the essence is always the same: the psychiatric patient stands apart from the rest of the world. This is why he has a world of his own: in his world, houses can sway forward and flowers can look dull and colorless. This is why he also has a special sort of body: his heart aches, his legs are weak and powerless. His past, too, is different. His rearing has failed, and this in turn causes his difficulties with other people – difficulties that summarize, as it were, all his other complaints. He is alone. He is a lonely man. Loneliness is the central core of his illness, no matter what his illness may be. Thus, loneliness is the nucleus of psychiatry. If loneliness did not exist, we could reasonably assume that psychiatric illness could not occur either…[105].
This reveals what is missing in the theories underlying the four mechanisms mentioned above. With these terms, ‘the distinction between healthy and mentally ill person is entirely lost'[104]. We all project, convert, transfer, and mythicize, but ‘the healthy person will discover in his healthy fellowmen the selfsame, or more or less the same, conversions, projections, transferences, and distortions of memory as he himself has, whereas the mentally ill person is alone with his mental mechanisms'[105].
This point is further elaborated in the discussion of the nature of hallucinations and delusions that follows. Van den Berg is not a fan of understanding hallucinations as something gone wrong, or broken, in the ‘connection’ between the person and reality. Hallucinations are the person’s reality. Hallucinated objects are even more real to the patient than everyday objects are for the not lonely. And even healthy person ‘subjected to complete isolation hallucinates in a short while. Sooner or later, the lonely person will create his own objects'[107]. Thus, the patient’s ‘hallucinations, his unapproachability and the fact that he cannot be understood are all one and the same thing: his illness'[108]. Hallucinations and delusions are not merely the consequence of a condition of loneliness, they are also the condition itself. Everything is related to everything else.
The book also has other very interesting things to say, for example on the way we perceive time or change; but this is not an exhaustive summary as I feel I will have to reread those parts again before being able to summarize them well. And as with everything in phenomenology, the ideas are for the most part not the sort of things that you can dissect easily, and put down on paper in A.B.C, or for that matter, summarize very successfully. This isn’t to say that the book isn’t written very clearly – the ideas in the book are conveyed mostly in examples, and I also loved the style of writing. It is a relatively short read as well, overall I recommend.
[this review is from my blog: https://philoreview.wordpress.com/201...]
Displaying 1 of 1 review