Philosophy and Psychopathology

by Manfred Spitzer (Editor), Brendan A. Maher (Editor)

Overview

Philosophy and psychopathology have more in common than philosophers, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists might think. Three fields of inquiry come to mind: (1) Questions about the scientific status of psychopatho­ logical statements and claims, (2) ethical questions, and (3) problems regarding the question of how to account for something like a disordered mind. While the first two domains have frequently been addressed in articles and debates (think of the mind-body problem and the problem of institutionalization versus self-determination as examples of issues in the two fields), the question of how the mind should be conceived in order for psychopathology to work best has seldom been discussed. The present volume focuses on this question. Perception, thought, affect, will, and the like are terms which made their way from philosophy into psychology, and into present psychiatry, where disturbances of these "faculties" or "functions" are believed to form the most basic part of symptomatology. While these terms and many others that are used to refer to symptoms of mental disorder (such as "self', "consciousness", "drive", and "identity") may seem to be purely descriptive and theoretically "innocent", they are packed with implicit assumptions, theoretical concepts, and sometimes dogmatic postulates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780387973036
Publisher:	Springer New York
Publication date:	05/23/1990
Edition description:	1990
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

Why Philosophy?.- Experience and its Disturbances.- Toward a Husserlian Phenomenology of the Initial Stages of Schizophrenia.- Concepts of Intentionality and Their Application to the Psychopathology of Schizophrenia—A Critique of the Vulnerability-Model.- Kant on Schizophrenia.- Are Psychotic Illnesses Category Disorders?—Proposal for a New Understanding and Classification of the Major Forms of Mental Illness.- Rationality and Self.- The Irrelevance of Rationality in Adaptive Behavior.- Limits of Irrationality.- Technical Problems with Teleological Explanation in Psychopathology: Sigmund Freud as a Case in Point.- Self-Consciousness, I-Structures, and Physiology.- When the Self Becomes Alien to Itself: Psychopathology and the Self Recursive Loop.- Perception, Thought, and Schizophrenia.- Verbal Hallucinations and Preconscious Mentality.- Schizophrenia and the Quantification of Semantic Phenomena: How Can Something Mean Something?.- Why Thinking is Easy.- On the Development of Categories.- Normality and Mental Illness—Dimensions Versus Categories: Methodological Considerations and Experimental Findings.- Relevance of Transcendental Philosophy to the Foundations of Psychopathology.- Final Comments and Reflections.- Synopsis and Critical Remarks.- Name Index.

Editorial Reviews

What can the manifestations of schizophrenia and other mental disorders reveal about classical notions of philosophy such as thought, perception, self, and rationality? Philosophers, psychiatrists, and clinical psychologists got together to compare notes at Harvard in October 1989, and presented these 16 papers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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