Mechanisms of Psychological Distress following War in the Former Yugoslavia: The Role of Interpersonal Sensitivity

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This study was funded by a grant from the European Commission, contract number INCO-CT-2004-509176. AN was supported by a Clinical Early Career Research Fellowship (113295) and a Project Grant (104288

A critical perspective on second-order empathy in understanding psychopathology: phenomenology and ethics

The centenary of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology was recognised in 2013 with the publication of a volume of essays dedicated to his work (edited by Stanghellini and Fuchs). Leading phenomenological-psychopathologists and philosophers of psychiatry examined Jaspers notion of empathic understanding and his declaration that certain schizophrenic phenomena are ‘un-understandable’. The consensus reached by the authors was that Jaspers operated with a narrow conception of phenomenology and empathy and that schizophrenic phenomena can be understood through what they variously called second-order and radical empathy. This article offers a critical examination of the second-order empathic stance along phenomenological and ethical lines. It asks: (1) Is second-order empathy (phenomenologically) possible? (2) Is the second-order empathic stance an ethically acceptable attitude towards persons diagnosed with schizophrenia? I argue that second-order empathy is an incoherent method that cannot be realised. Further, the attitude promoted by this method is ethically problematic insofar as the emphasis placed on radical otherness disinvests persons diagnosed with schizophrenia from a fair chance to participate in the public construction of their identity and, hence, to redress traditional symbolic injustices

Temporality and spatiality of anxious experience

Since the first descriptions of anxiety, it has been related with temporality and in particular with the dimension of future. Thus, we already find anxiety defined as a general feeling of threatening (from the future) in the German mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1634). He also used the image of “the wheel of anxiety”, with which he refers to its probable origin in a conflict between two forces which tend to separate themselves and are not able to do it, as a result from this centrifugal rotation movement of a wheel. This image also has a temporal character. In Kierkegaard, we read that “anxiety is always related with the future… and when we are disturbed by the past we are basically projecting toward the future…” In Heidegger's masterpiece, “Being and Time”, there is a chapter dedicated to the temporality of Befindlichkeit, and in particular to anxiety. Fear and anxiety have their roots, according to Heidegger, in the past, but their relation with the future makes them different: anxiety arises from the future as possibility, while fear arises from the lost present. In this paper, we try to make a contribution to the phenomenology of temporality (and of spatiality) of anxiety in relation with the analysis of a concrete anxiety experience: flight phobia. The analysis allows us to show both the desolation and narrowing of anxiety space, and with respect to temporality, the disappearance of every plan (the future), of every history (the past), and the reduction of the present to a succession of mere punctualities, behind which there arises, threatening, the nothingness itself.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.</jats:sec

Phenomenology of emotions

This symposium analyses the psychopathological phenomenon “anxiety”, a classical concept, which has returned to be central in the recent psychiatric debate. Some of the most important international phenomenologists will discuss anxiety in the context of major psychopathological areas. Clinical and research insight will be presented in the context of a philosophically deep understanding of the fundamental qualitative features of the psychopathology of anxiety.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.</jats:sec