Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology Launch Event Speaker Abstracts.
Dr. Robert Chapman
Marx and Mental Health: Alienation in a Post-Fordist era
In this talk I focus on experiences of mental illness and disablement in a post-Fordist era, with an emphasis on this era’s heavy reliance on cognitive and emotional labour. My interest lies in how Marxian conceptions of alienation can clarify how these cognitive and emotional demands shape increasingly widespread experiences of mental illness and disability. I begin by considering some existing Marxian accounts of mental illness which suggest current experience is largely determined by marketing from pharmaceutical companies. I argue such accounts are overly reductionistic and mainly function to erase vital aspects of the reality of mental illness and disablement. I then draw on the concept of alienation to help propose an alternative account that helps make sense of experiences of both illness as something one “has” and neurodivergent as something one “is”. I clarify this difference as depending on different material and social relations and thus different forms of alienation. Finally, I synthesise the two issues I highlight by proposing that our current phase of capitalism traps each of us in a cognitive-emotional double bind. On my account, all forms of cognition and emotion that can be mined for productivity are ruthlessly exploited and alienated from the self; while those considered unsuited to the current means of production are not just disabled and excluded from work but alienated from others through the imposition of increasingly strict cognitive-emotional hierarchies. Either way, few thrive under these conditions, we are all alienated from aspects of self or others – and most of us experiences illness or disability.
Dr Lucy Bolton
‘Fear itself, and not the statement “I am afraid”’
Film phenomenology: consciousness, bodies, and lived experience.
Writing about the cinema in 1926, Virginia Woolf observed that terror ‘burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears’, and that anger ‘might writhe like an infuriated worm in black zigzags across a white sheet’. Woolf realized that thought and feeling can be made visible to the eye without the help of words. So much power did she see in the capacity of cinema that she was concerned filmmakers did not quite know what their medium was capable of.
Film is a form of art that can show meaning without telling. Film phenomenology is largely concerned with describing, understanding and developing these meanings, as a productive and expansive, yet clarifying, endeavour. Vitally, film phenomenology is not a rigorous theoretical application, but nor is it a loose approach which resists pinning anything down. Approaching a film with a phenomenological outlook requires one to be open to seeing what the film does, how it evokes meaning, and what it conveys. This frees the film from being tied to many of the evaluative judgements and subjective criticisms that the medium so readily attracts, and enables it to express itself as a film-being.
In this paper, I will briefly set out the pathway that led to the development of film-phenomenology, from Edmund Husserl, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with a detour to Simone De Beauvoir on my way to Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks and Iris Marion Young, and assess the point the field has reached, with influential work by Kate Ince and Katharina Lindner. Then I will sketch my encounters with phenomenology across the humanities, and how it has formed a major part of my work in the field of film-philosophy. And, using a scene from the film Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold in 2009, I will demonstrate how a film-phenomenology which is sensitive to thought, embodiment and knowledge is irresistible in the face of such affectively powerful filmmaking. To conclude, I will suggest that phenomenology as an approach to film is enabling for both the film and those who encounter it, and that this open, receptive and inclusive orientation is grounded in the recognition of a variety of possibilities, not all of which are reducible to neat theoretical categories.
Professor Kevin Aho
Phenomenological Psychopathology in the Age of Anti-Depressants
Phenomenological approaches to psychopathology are often viewed as being at odds with biological or medical-model approaches. Whereas the latter tends to reduce mental illness to a discrete medical condition resulting from so-called “chemical imbalances” in the brain, the former is concerned with the experience of psychopathology itself, with how mental illness is felt and made intelligible by the sufferer. On this view, a phenomenological approach is less concerned with the biochemical cause of psychopathology than with its meaning. And there is growing concern in critical circles that widespread antidepressant use—13% of the US population and 17% of the UK population currently take antidepressants—can blunt or suppress the experiential meanings that psychopathology expresses, meanings that can help the sufferer understand and make sense of their distress.
In this talk, I explore this tension and try to take a middle ground, arguing that the medicalization of mental illness and the overprescribing of antidepressants is a very real problem and that antidepressants can be valuable from a phenomenological perspective insofar as they act on the meaning-structures that are disrupted in mental illness. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenology of human existence (or Dasein), I suggest antidepressants work, not so much by alleviating or blunting distressing feelings, but by the way they affect our way of being-in-the-world itself, allowing the sufferer to once again be open and receptive to new possibilities, to feel things in an undistorted and proportional way, and to not get stuck in these feelings. This analysis helps us understand what Heidegger means in his Zollikon Seminars when he tells the attending doctors and psychiatrists that illness is best understood not as a biochemical phenomenon, but as an impaired or diminished way of being set by “a loss of freedom [and] a constriction of the possibility for living.”