Le projet de la psychiatrie phénonménologique. The Phenomenological approach and its application to psychiatry

The author focuses essentially on L. Binswanger’s contribution in his analysis of phenomenology’s influence on modern psychiatry. After first summarizing the philosophical meaning of phenomenology, he focuses on phenomenology’s choice of an “understanding description” of mental disorders which excludes any scientific approach based on “causal explanation”. The author goes on to analyze the impasse reached by the phenomenological approach, especially in psychiatry, demonstrating how comprehensive interpretation and causal reconstruction are in fact always inseparable: the phenomenological commitment thus responds more to a challenge, in a broader ideological, “humanist” sense, and its background is both an ethical and speculative protest against our technosciences-dominated civilization. Yet the reformation-driven phenomenological psychiatrists ultimately acknowledge causality insofar as they end up denouncing the technoscientific civilization as such as one of the causes of mental morbidity.