Abstract Several enactive-phenomenological perspectives have pointed to affectivity as a central aspect of mental disorders. Indeed, from an enactive perspective, sense-making is an inherently ...affective process. A question remains on the role of different forms of affective experiences (i.e., existential feelings, atmospheres, moods, and emotions) in sense-making and, consequently, in mental disorders. This work elaborates on the enactive perspective on mental disorders by attending to the primordial role of affectivity in the self-individuation process. Inspired by Husserl’s genetic methodology and Simondonian philosophy of individuation, sense-making is described as the process of progressive concretization and structuration of the self-world structures that support the intentionality of conscious experiences. Accordingly, affectivity is described as the force that anticipates a partial self-world coherence in sense-making. Structurally different types of affective experiences are integrated into the genetic picture and, on this basis, a reinterpretation and classification of certain mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, depression, and the anxiety spectrum, is provided. In this way, this work contributes to a phenomenologically informed enactive account of mental disorders as disorders of affectivity.
In this paper, I address Husserl’s theory of intentionality focusing on the problems of attention. I claim that without phenomenological reduction the specific phenomenological content of ...modalizations – in intentional acts – would be hard to explain. It would be impossible to understand why constant external factors (for instance, variations in the intensity of a stimulus) are accompanied by fluctuations in attention. It would also be impossible to understand the reasons why only the lived experience of causality – which I sharply distinguish from causality in the psychophysical sense of the term – transforms attention into a factor that allows the understanding of a situation by the subject who lives that experience. I claim at last that only the genetic analysis of Husserl’s late Freiburg period, with its distinction between primary and secondary attention, gives a full account of the relation between the thematic object, focused on an intentional attentive act, and the horizon that surrounds the object and gives it its ultimate meaning.
This paper tries to document Husserl’s reflections on the problem of “situations” in his later manuscripts of the 1930s. These reflections are centered on the phenomenon of “typificiation”, which ...plays an important part in Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. Thus, the paper starts by sketching out a general presentation of “typification” in its relation to expectation and habit. By defining situation as “the intentional living unity of horizontal context and subjective potentiality”, the paper then tries to follow Husserl’s exposition of three essential aspects of situational typification: a.) the habituality of interest; b.) normality and c.) periodicity.
In this paper, relying on both phenomenology and psychoanalysis, I introduce the concept of transbodily intentionality with the aim of exploring the significance of bodily expression for subjective ...constitution. The role of the body for the constitution of subjective experience becomes increasingly important in phenomenological analysis. This faces us with the challenge of understanding the intersubjective relevance of bodily processes together with the genetic turn of phenomenology. On this background, the revaluation of the concept of gesture comes into light. The meaning of the gesture cannot be framed in an exclusively subjective context, but rather requires a communicative and intersubjective horizon.
Ever since the 1960s, media and communication studies have abounded in heated debates concerning the psychological and social effects of fictional media violence. Massive empirical research has first ...tried to tie film violence to cultivating either fear or aggressive tendencies among its viewership, while later research has focused on other media as well (television, video games). The present paper does not aim to settle the factual question of whether or not medial experiences indeed engender real emotional dispositions. Instead, it brings into play the resources of genetic phenomenology in order to ask how the formation of such dispositions would be generally possible. Thus, it aims to further the discussion by overtly employing the framework of Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology to the field of emotional experience. By posing questions with regard to how fictional emotional experiences contribute to the formation of apperceptions and to the specificities of emotional sedimentation, it also points out some shortcomings in Husserl’s account by drawing from Freud’s dynamic theory of drives and emotions.
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to outline an integrative account of experiential and narrative dimensions of the self based on Husserl's genetic phenomenology. I argue that we should discard ..."strong narrativism" which holds that our experiential life has a narrative structure and, accordingly, that experiential and narrative dimensions of the self coincide. We should also refrain from equating the experiential self with the minimal self, as the former does not simply constitute a formally individuated subject as the latter but a properly individualized one with personal characteristics and habituality. Husserl's genetic phenomenology offers both a description of the individualized self as experiential, i.e. as pre-reflective and embodied, and as narrative, i.e. as an autonomous linguistic agent. Through Husserl's concepts of sedimentation and secondary passivity, we can explain the dialectical relationship between experiential and narrative dimensions of the self.
Psychology students and professionals alike often do not realize that Edmund Husserl addressed core themes of Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology and that the respective works of Piaget and Husserl ...share various conceptual kinships. This article articulates these kinships and also considers divergences between Piaget's and Husserl's viewpoints. In carrying out the latter, Husserl's philosophical insights are offered as phenomenological critiques of Piaget's theory. Conceptual kinships were anchored in a multideterminant view of cognitive development, a self-regulated perspective on development, attempts to take on Kantian themes in new ways to overcome traditional empirical and rationalist epistemologies, emphases on genesis, world-formation, and world-expansion, an examination of the way science culturally exemplifies world-expansion, and a belief in the convergence of truth and value. Critiques were framed in terms of Piaget's implicit assimilatory bias and his decentration bias. Avenues for approaching Piaget from a humanistic, phenomenological orientation to psychology were also considered.
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