Obsessive-Compulsive Experience and Phenomenological Verticality: A Mad Studies Approach

Abstract

A new epistemological approach considers the nature of mental disorders to be primarily constituted by the patient 's anomalies of experience, expression, and existence that typically involve suffering and dysfunction. Models integrating phenomenology explore the particular relationship of OCD patients with their world, and recognize in OCD a characteristic personological configuration (obsessive ‘organization of personal meaning’) that is heightened in OCD patients. They experience the world emotionally as a sterile set of rules, and this experience determines their suffering [1].

One’s life-world is the manifold forms of a person’s experience, and manifests concretely to a person as immediate evidence. Lifeworld analysis is a hermeneutic method that focuses on space, time, body, self, emotions, others, and values [2]. It allows for examining psychopathological symptoms as the result of a crisis in one’s dialogue with alterity, or of some difficulty in partaking in it.

Anthony Steinbock developed a phenomenological-philosophical anthropology where he traces the meaning of what it is to be a person to what he calls the heart, in which the generativity of personhood is revealed through moral emotions (loving) [3]. He describes loving as a vertical mode of givenness, meaning it has its own forms of evidence and deception. The insight that phenomenologically, in our experiences, something can take hold of us in an absolute manner, allows his framework to see obsessions as forms of idolatry. Seeing them as spiritual disorders; disorders of the heart, he puts emphasis on a lack of verticality which causes a disharmony of one’s participation as person in relations with the Other. Since absolute experiences are vertical, they should be treated in their own language, not as (horizontal) epistemic objects or through reasoning.

This thesis investigates how Steinbock's phenomenological framework of verticality and idolatry can serve to reinterpret Obsessive-Compulsive Experience (OCE) in the context of Mad Studies (MS). I coin the term OCE and aim to provide a start to its description and understanding. By including Mad people’s voices in constructing OCE through their lived experience it can potentially inform better treatment. Firstly, Steinbock’s framework will be described in order to examine how it can serve to reinterpret and potentially treat OCE while existing approaches and their limitations are discussed. Secondly, I will use life-world analysis to examine OCE line with MS (focusing on the recent empirical turn in phenomenology where the interpersonal, performative, spiritual, and stigmatisation themes appear salient). Finally, I will synthesize those findings with Steinbock’s framework and provide further recommendations.

References

[1] F. Demaria, M. Pontillo, D. Bellantoni, C. Di Vincenzo, and S. Vicario, "Phenomenological considerations of the world of the obsessive patient," Journal of Clinical Medicine, vol. 12, no.13, p. 4193, 2023. doi: 10.3390/jcm12134193. 

[2] G. Stanghellini, "The PHD method for psychotherapy: Integrating phenomenology, hermeneutics, and Psychodynamics," Psychopathology,  vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 75–84, 2019. doi: 10.1159/000500272. 

[3] A. J. Steinbock, Knowing by heart: Loving as participation and critique. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021.