The Essentials of Existential Psychoanalysis
The
purpose of this inquiry was to provide a guide for discussing the
essential requirements for existential therapy, in particular within
the initial phase. From the responses of a sample of professional
therapists, three essential themes have been identified: convenience
(that is, having a script that will allow the therapist to reach a
rapid understanding of the nature of the client’s existential
being), mythic familiarity, and an emphasis upon imaginal techniques.
On
the Phenomenon of Inserted Thoughts: A Critique of Shaun
Gallagher’s Neurophenomenological Account of Thought Insertion
This
paper explores the phenomenon of thought insertion, an experience
reported by some schizophrenics where it is believed that other persons
or forces are inserting thoughts into their minds. This relatively
circumscribed symptom of schizophrenia raises difficult questions
concerning our sense of agency for our thoughts. How is it possible
that persons can think that their thoughts are not their own?
Gallagher, drawing on Husserl’s early work on time-consciousness,
provides a subtle and sophisticated answer to this problem, suggesting
that protention may underlie our sense of agency for thinking and that
the experience of inserted thoughts may occur in the event of an
intermittent failure in this protentional function. More recent Husserl
scholarship suggests, however, that this account may face problems on
phenomenological grounds. It is argued here that our sense of agency
for thinking requires more than protention, and, consequently, that the
absence of protention cannot fully explain the loss of agency for
thinking characterizing the experience of thought insertion. In order
to contextualize this discussion of the phenomenon theoretically and,
in the process, to provide an introduction to the difficulties in
explaining it, this paper proceeds with a consideration of
Frith’s early cognitive account of thought insertion and the
contribution of Stephens and Graham in this regard. In conclusion, it
is argued that, despite the merits of all three accounts presented,
they remain unable to account for the phenomenon of inserted thoughts,
and that we might more fruitfully understand this experience as being a
type of uncontrollable passive or autochthonous thinking.
Fatherhood as Taking the Child to Oneself: A Phenomenological Observation Study after Caesarean Birth
This
paper describes the meaning of a father’s presence with a
full-term healthy child delivered by caesarean section, as observed
during the routine post-operative separation of mother and child.
Videotaped observations recorded at a maternity clinic located in the
metropolitan area of Stockholm, Sweden formed the basis for the study,
in which fifteen fathers with their infants participated within two
hours of elective caesarean delivery in the 37th - 40th week of
pregnancy.
A phenomenological analysis based on Giorgi’s
method was conducted on the data. The description of the new
father’s experiences that emerged pointed to a process of being
and becoming in taking the child to himself. Fatherhood developed
gradually as a result of recurrent experiences of the child’s
expressions. There was an ebb and flow between taking on the role of
being a father and physical withdrawal from the role.
The findings of this study not only confirm previous
accounts of new fathers’ experiences, but go further in revealing
an ebb and flow variation in the fathers’ involvement. What this
indicates is that the process of transition to fatherhood requires not
only presence but time. The period required for this process thus must
not be disturbed, but supported, trusting in the father’s ability
to assume his role as a father. It is suggested that, in addition to
their relevance in guiding the attitudes and expectations of those
professionally involved in postnatal care and community health, these
findings could be useful in antenatal courses for parents, and
especially in instances when caesarean birth is planned, to highlight
the meaning of the role of fathers as caregivers.
On
the Sense of Ownership of a Community Integration Project:
Phenomenology as Praxis in the Transfer of Project Ownership from Third-Party Facilitators to a Community after Conflict Resolution
There
are non-governmental organizations that operate transnationally and
there are those that operate within the boundaries of a nation. A third
use of non-governmental organizations is articulated. We may call this
third category an instrumental use of non-governmental organizations to
facilitate the transfer of the work of third-party conflict resolution
practitioners to the two previously feuding parties. Representative
accounts are provided in Part I of this paper.
In Part II, the instrumental use of the NGO to
transfer knowledge from practitioners to the indigenous and previously
feuding parties is depicted as a means to fill a practice gap in the
field of conflict resolution, where many praxes do not examine the
transfer of knowledge in an experiential and discovery-oriented way. An
alternative is presented where the process of appropriation is
suggested as an object of study.
In Part III, a conceptualization of how one may
determine the phenomenology of a sense of ownership of the project by
the previously feuding parties is provided. A phenomenological account
of the journey from constituting subjectivity to a constituted
objectivity is articulated to the point where we see a division of
labour between Husserl’s transcendental project, that seeks
universal and broader essences, and psychology, which is highly
contextualized.
Part IV constitutes the implementation of the praxis
to answer the specific question, “What is the sense of ownership
of the parties in conflict?” - and, derivatively,
“What is the fate of the hitherto agonistic relation?” A
conflict resolution model is consolidated or reconfigured using the
lessons drawn from the results of the study and from a second look at
the literature to see where changes in practice and reconceptualization
may be required.
Language: Functionalism versus Authenticity
This
paper sets out to demonstrate that a phenomenological reflection on
language highlights the possibilities of authenticity in communication,
and as such provides a very necessary complement to the dominant
linguistic perspectives: the syntactic and grammatical perspective,
Saussurean linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics. While the
syntactic and grammatical perspective, which predominates in the
educational context, presents language as an institutionalized,
authoritarian and self-contained system, Saussurean linguistics
provides a view of language as a complex, self-contained, technical
system, as such reflecting the nature of modern society. The third
perspective, systemic functional linguistics, describes templates of
specific genre, models which aid students to construct their own, while
simultaneously discouraging individual self-expression. In contrast, a
reflective phenomenological perspective identifies and encourages
authentic self-expression. The paper concludes by considering ways to
reconcile the impetus in language teaching towards, on the one hand,
the language of institutional authority, and, on the other, individual
self-expression.
How Does a Dark Room Appear:Husserl’s Illumination of the Breakthrough of Logical Investigations
Evidence is the very core of Husserlian phenomenology, with the term “evidence” signifying for Husserl the phenomenological
perspective on the question of truth. In contrast to the conventional
philosophical understanding of “truth” in mainly
epistemological terms, Husserl’s notion of
“evidence”, as elaborated in his Logical Investigations
(1900–1), is more essentially ontological, pointing to the way in
which a phenomenon becomes clear to us in its constitution.
Husserl’s main point in the Sixth Investigation was that we can
“see” how evidence functions when we compare something in
the fullness of its presence with the emptiness of its absence. This
paper considers the example Husserl offers of the room where the lights
go off in order to illuminate the breakthrough for phenomenology
achieved by Logical Investigations in its move beyond logic and
epistemology to the primary level of pretheoretical experience as the
reality of the real.
