Temporality and the Phenomena of Addiction and Recovery: Phenomenology, Symbolic Interaction and the Meaning/Interpretation Debate

This thesis is a hermeneutic phenomenological investigation of the phenomenon of addiction, particularly alcohol addiction. My thesis draws heavily from the phenomenological school of hermeneutic phenomenology, in particular Max Van Manen’s (2006) text, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy as a frame of reference for my inquiry into and analysis of the lived experience of addiction and recovery. The Van Manen text is used as a research handbook, guiding my approach, my analysis, and the project more generally. My thesis found that, using the existential of lived time, temporality, in recovery the present is essentially different than the past, and that recovering addicts necessarily rethink and reorient themselves to the past to heal

The Ethic of Responsibility: Max Weber's Verstehen and Shared Decision-Making in Patient-Centred Care.

Funder: University of CambridgeWhereas evidence-based medicine (EBM) encourages the translation of medical research into decision-making through clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), patient-centred care (PCC) aims to integrate patient values through shared decision-making. In order to successfully integrate EBM and PCC, I propose a method of orienting physician decision-making to overcome the different obligations set out by a formally-rational EBM and substantively-rational ethics of care. I engage with Weber's concepts "the ethic of responsibility" and verstehen as a new model of clinical reasoning that reformulates the relationship between medical knowledge and social values, while demonstrating the relevance of the classical sociological cannon to contemporary medical humanities