Phenomenology of Paranoia. Time, Space, Other
- Ariane Bilheran
- Dec 2, 2016
- 19 min read
Updated: Jul 20
This article appeared in the journal Phenomenological Chronicles for the month of December 2016.
Phenomenological psychopathology is based on "the return to things themselves" (Husserl), based on intuition and the world of living ( Lebenswelt ): "It is a matter of nothing more, nothing less, than sticking to experience, [...] not adding to experience a pre-given theory, even implicit, [...] not removing what is too obvious in it, and therefore usually not questioned because it is not problematic [...]. Knowledge of phenomena is no longer inductive but intuitive" (Naudin, Pringuey, Azorin, 1998).
If phenomenological psychopathology has traditionally focused a lot on the relationship to time in melancholia and mania (see the works of Minkowski, Binswanger, Tatossian, on the subject of manic temporality reduced to the instant without present, to name only the most famous) or even in schizophrenia (refer, among others, to Blankenburg, with the "loss of natural evidence", as well as to Fernandez-Zoïla, with the discontinuous and dislocated temporal present, broken etc.), it would have a lot to do to study paranoia further.
Psychosis characterized by a semblance of logical maintenance (unlike paranoid schizophrenia), called "reasoning madness", paranoia is the pathology of the delusional interpretation of signs.
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