Susi Ferrarello

This article examines the intersection of anxiety, emotional geography, and bioethics, exploring how uncertainty shapes the experience of patients navigating medical and social landscapes. When is the good time to start worrying about one’s own well-being? Who is the “good patient”? Anxiety, particularly in medical contexts, arises from the epistemic tension between known and unknown realities, challenging patients and clinicians alike to discern which concerns warrant attention. Drawing on phenomenological and bioethical perspectives—including those of Heidegger ( 1962 ), Sartre ( 1996 ), Ricoeur ( 1992, 2004 ), and Tillich ( 1952 ), as well as the phenomenology of the body developed by Leder ( 1990 )—alongside contemporary scholarship in emotional geography and medical humanities, this paper investigates different forms of anxiety: digital, existential, and spatial, and their impact on subjective and intersubjective medical experiences. Special attention is given to the “dys-appearing” body, the disruption of embodied self-evidence in illness, the courage required to exist in the face of medical uncertainty, and the constitutive role of intersubjective environments in shaping patients’ sense of well-being. Ultimately, I argue for a more compassionate, intentional engagement with anxiety that transcends mere symptom management, advocating instead for a holistic approach that accounts for the emotional, spatial, and existential constitution of patients’ realities.

This study explores the unique, symmetrical experience of affective sharing between mother and child during pregnancy and early motherhood. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “[w]hat happens in me can pass over into the other,” it examines how maternal and infant affects co-create a shared bodily schema, producing a form of existence that is both separate and intertwined. In pregnancy, a woman’s body transforms as it becomes both her own and the origin of a new life. My analysis aligns with a posthumanist perspective critical of modern humanist conceptions of the human as a atomistic and self-sufficient individual. Motherhood moves women through “obscure forces,” as Simone de Beauvoir says, embodying self-transcendence supported by a cultural technology honed over centuries. Through a phenomenological lens, this study considers how women embody this transcendence as mothers, examining intersubjectivity’s role in reshaping corporeal schemas. This transition to motherhood is a unique form of embodiment, distinct from “fusion,” loss of identity, or the split subjectivity theorized by Iris Marion Young. Instead, it creates a locus of embodied intersubjectivity, wherein mother and child form a “couple overwhelmed by life.” Unlike other forms of empathetic or intersubjective acts, this new form of couple in motherhood establishes an enduring co-Existenz that embodies the mother-baby bond. This intersubjective bond, specific to motherhood, creates a space that highlights a distinct existential transformation unique to maternal experience.

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness brings together two schools of thought and practice that - despite rarely being examined jointly - provide an incredibly fruitful way for exploring thinking, the mind, and the nature and practice of mindfulness. Applying the concepts and methods of phenomenology, an international team of contributors explore mindfulness from a variety of different viewpoints and traditions. The handbook's thirty-four chapters are divided into seven clear parts: Mindfulness in the Western Traditions Mindfulness in the Eastern Traditions Mindfulness, Ethics and Well-Being Mindfulness, Time and Attention Mindfulness and Embodiment Applications: Mindfulness in Life Conclusion: Mindfulness and Phenomenology? Within these sections, a rich array of topics and themes are explored, ranging from Stoicism and the origins of mindfulness in Buddhism and eastern thought to meditation, self-awareness, the body and embodiment, and critiques of mindfulness. Additionally, the book delves into the ways the ideas of leading phenomenological thinkers, including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, can contribute to understanding the relationship between phenomenology and mindfulness. A valuable resource for those researching phenomenology and applications of phenomenology, this handbook will also be of great interest to students and practitioners of mindfulness in areas such as counseling and psychotherapy.

This chapter discusses the notion of happiness from a phenomenological (strictly Husserlian) point of view. In the paper the author combines her experience as philosophical practitioner with her philosophical knowledge of Husserl’s phenomenology to address some of the most common questions that clients raised around happiness. Can I have all that I desire and still be unhappy? Would good habits help me to live a happy life? Can I decide to be happy? Can I be happy despite my bad luck? These are some of the questions that this paper is going to investigate using the auxiliary help of Husserl’s phenomenology.

In Classical Phenomenology Applied to Gender Identity, Ian Rory Owen explores the phenomenological foundations of gender identity through the lens of Kant, Husserl (1970), and Heidegger. Structured in ten chapters, along with an interlude, a concluding chapter, and an epilogue, the book offers a detailed account of how phenomenology can deepen our understanding of gender as a dynamic, lived experience that integrates personal, cultural, and social dimensions. Owen’s work presents phenomenology as a framework for investigating identity in a way that transcends rigid binaries, highlighting the relevance of classical phenomenological ideas for contemporary questions of gender.

In this paper I will investigate the ethical implications that Kant’s and Husserl’s notions of the transcendental exert on the meaning-giving activity of one’s life. Hence, the paper will focus first on how Kant arrived at his view of the transcendental as a bridge between being and meaning; second, the paper will show the Kantian heritage in Husserl and describe how Husserl’s interpretation of the transcendental facilitates an understanding of it as fully based on the ethical commitment expressed by the epoché and reduction. The aim of this comparison is first to clarify whether or not Kant’s and Husserl’s philosophical use of the transcendental invites an individualistic ethical attitude in relation to the constitution of meanings within the life-world; second, the goal is to see if our affective, emotional, in one word interpretive answer, to the transcendental rule triggers in humans a way to interpret reality that emphasizes the separation more than the interconnectedness of reality itself.

In this paper we will be discussing the ethical risks of the transcendental quality of virtual spaces as they apply to digital health, especially in relation to new attempts to construct a “social mediome.” As we will discuss in the following section, phenomenology has raised criticisms against the context-lessness and ethical opacity of technology. The creation of a social mediome seems to come as an answer to this criticism as it creates a context that gives voice and flesh to human beings within their virtual lives. Yet, as we will discuss in this paper, the transcendental quality of this social mediome might involve the risk of normalizing health in a way that would prevent individuals from achieving well-being according to the meaning that they personally attribute to it.

This book offers a unique description of how phenomenology can help professionals from medical, environmental and social fields to explore notions such as interaffectivity, empathy, epoche, reduction, and intersubjective encounter. Written by a group of top scholars, it uniquely covers the relationship between phenomenology and bioethics, and focuses not only on medical cases, but also on the environment and emerging technologies. This variety of themes, whilst including techno-ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, and medical ethics, is conducive to appreciating broadly how phenomenology can improve our quality of our life. Despite its difficult themes, the book appeals to an audience of both academics and professionals who are willing to understand how to increase the quality of care in their professional field.

How does it happen that we experience reality in such a way that it becomes meaningful for us?1 How do we make sense of our life? Ultimately, does the reality we experience hold value per se? This article will address these questions by way of a phenomenological answer concerning the source of morality and its boundaries with religion and psychology. Both religion and morality provide human beings with values through which they interpret and give structure to their lives.2 This yields an overarching sense of the real. Yet, in moments of psychological distress, this axiological structure might mutate and lead to a view of reality that has become detached from the intersubjective understandings shared by one’s...

This paper is going to focus on the problem of emotions in technology, in particular in reference to the case of algorithms developed to track early rehospitalizations. In this paper I am going to discuss how phenomenology can support the integration of emotions in technology and how this integration can improve our chances for that “decent survival” that the founder of bioethics, Potter, has envisioned as the main goal of this discipline (Natl Cancer Inst Monogr 13:111–116, 1964; Bioethics, bridge to the future. Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, p 24, 1971; Ann N Y Acad Sci 196(Art. 4):200–205, 1972; Cancer Res 35:2297–2306, 1975; Global bioethics. Michigan University, 1988). I believe that descriptive phenomenology can be a useful philosophical and psychological approach to improve the moral and emotional intelligence behind machine learning programming (Dreyfus, What computers can’t do: the limits of artificial intelligence. HarperCollins, 1978; The Socratic and platonic basis of cognitivism. AI & Society, Springer, Berlin, 1988) and overcome the risk of ethical opacity implied in programming (Casacuberta, Ethical and technical aspects of emotions to create empathy in medical machines. In Van Rysewik SP, Pontier M (eds) Machine in medical ethics. Springer, New York/Dordrecht, 2015). On the one hand, the ethical aspect of phenomenology would allow us to grasp the predicative and pre-predicative facie of the lived-experiences and their emotional contents. On the other hand, the phenomenological method of research applied in psychology would offer a way to transcribe and interpret data in a responsible and contextualized way.

From my point of view, the pandemic worsened the rigidity of epistemic injustices. I work as a philosophical counselor, and I research bioethics. For me, bioethics, in line with what Potter wrote, is a discipline that cannot be separated from individual problems. I believe that we cannot think of a sustainable life on this planet if we first do not learn how to live a sustainable one.During this pandemic, my work as a philosophical counselor consisted mostly of helping my clients to live sustainable lives by not buying into rigid categories that underlined heavy social injustices. I supported them in holding on to their narratives against, more or less implied, guidelines that would have made their world...

Following up from the previous book, Human Emotions and the Origins of Bioethics, this volume focuses on four psychological problems, anxiety, narcissism, restlessness, and emotional numbness, and explores how these problems influence bioethical issues and what bioethics can do to fix them. The Role of Bioethics in Emotional Problems presents a phenomenological exploration of emotional intention and describes how one's choices can determine a better relationship to themselves and their community. Not only does this book provide the reader with an exhaustive account of the philosophical and psychological meaning of practical intentionality within Husserl's phenomenology, but it also applies Husserl's ethics to contemporary studies of human emotions and bioethical problems. Offering a non-reductionist model for an interdisciplinary inquiry into an emotional experience, it integrates clinical practice and articulates foundational knowledge of human emotional life at a professional level. Aimed at students of philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, and bioethics, this book is a unique phenomenological dialogue between these disciplines on emotional well-being.

This paper will discuss the notion of solastalgia or climatic anxiety (Albrecht et al., 2007; Galea et al., 2005,) as a form of anxiety connected to traumatic environmental changes that generate an emotional blockage between individuals, their environment (Cloke et al., 2004,) and their place (Nancy, 1993,). I will use a phenomenological approach to explain the way in which emotions shape our constitution of reality (Husserl, 1970; Sartre, 1983, 1993, 1996; Seamon and Sowers, 2009; Shaw and Ward, 2009). The article’s overall goal is to describe the relationship between environment and “climatic” emotions to understand what we can do to improve our well-being. I believe that scientistic and reductionistic ways of looking at climatic anxiety do not consider this complex dynamic and fail to propose actual solutions for the well-being of both the environment and the individuals.

The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy presents a phenomenological exploration of love as it manifests itself through sexual desires and intimate relationships. Setting up a unique dialogue between psychology and philosophy, Susi Ferrarello offers a perspective through which clinicians can inform their practice on diverse issues of human sexuality. Drawing on Husserl's phenomenology, Ferrarello's analysis of love spans a range of disciplines including psychology, theology, biology, epistemology, and axiology, as well as areas related to gender, consent, and political control. Combining Husserlian perspectives on ethics with a focus on lived-experience, this text will deepen therapists' understanding of love as the subject of interdisciplinary inquiry and enable them to locate questions of sexuality and intimacy within an academic framework. With key theoretical principles included to allow clinicians to think through and clarify their practice, this book will be a valuable tool for sex therapists, marriage and family therapists, and counselors, as well as psychology and philosophy students alike.

Eudaimonia, that is, the experience of flourishing and welfare at the center of Greek philosophical investigations, describes the qualitative experience of being able to feel well in our bodies. Reductionism in medicine as well as in philosophy would instead reduce well-being to a set of standards that the human body or its mind must meet in order to be recognized as functioning. This journal issue, dedicated to a phenomenological approach in bioethics, represents a way to overcome this dangerous constraint thanks to the methodological support of the phenomenological investigations. The authors invited to write in this journal issue will tackle the problem of reductionism in bioethics through a phenomenological approach.

The vulnerability of the human world is an edited book that collects papers reflecting on the problem of well-being, health, and vulnerability in our current society. The ‘human world’ to which we refer points to the anthropological, environmental, and ecological issues in relation to health and well-being that we propose to discuss. It addresses the need for a critical anthropological concept that overcomes the biases of modern anthropocentrism while addressing the specific responsibility of humans in contemporary world crisis. We do not try to give a final definition for what vulnerability is, but we problematize the notion of well-being as a standard of non-vulnerability that is often imposed on human beings; often well-being becomes a measure within which human beings should fit to not be vulnerable. Consequently, well-being has been implicitly defined as the opposite of vulnerability – especially when vulnerability is conceived as a risk or a threat to oneself or the community, rather than a potential source of growth and transformation. For this reason, we believe that well-being is more the title of a problem rather than its solution. This paradigm initiates, indeed, a “positive” conception of health that aims to push the boundaries of human finitude such as suffering, illness and the recognition of mortality. Usually, we assume that well-being is the final goal of our choices and the gist of a decent life, but we spend more time striving for well-being than asking ourselves what being well means for us, as individuals and societies. This paradox may generate emotional frustration which often worsens our condition rather than helps it reach its optimum. Moreover, it may generate and increase inequalities between people and countries who may suffer from the discrepancies in their access to healthcare or vaccination. Therefore, it also raises questions about collective justice and interdependence. Indeed, the concept of well-being seems to block a critical and epistemological appraisal of the concept of “health,” conflating thereby the impression of being “well,” which is normed by sociological, cultural and moral standards with the lived reality of what it means to be healthy – which itself needs to be questioned in light of the scientific paradigms that built human biology and environmental approaches over the past decades.

In this chapter 1 discuss how the ego arises within the lived experiences of the concrete human being by comparing Husserl’s and Peirce’s notions of the constitution of the ‘I’. This chapter consists of a comparative examination of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and Peirce’s category of secondness. It compares Husserl’s notion of awakening of the ego with Peirce’s psychological notion of ego reaction. In contrast to Spiegelberg, Philos Phenomenol Res,17(2):164–185, (1956: 170) claim according to which the “Heraclitean” picture of Peirce’s system is a “major obstacle to a full-scale comparison between the two phenomenologies”, I try to show that it is precisely this Heraclitean image of the soul that makes Peirce and Husserl’s systems, after all, so surprisingly similar.

I am looking at a bird flying above my head and I barely see it; in the meantime I am talking to a friend of mine about my job. All these things: the bird, my friend, my job, even the ground beneath my feet, are outside of me. Yet, while I am living these objects, they are here, in my head. How can one explain this relationship,where something that is completely different from my being becomes a part of me? If something transcends my own nature, how can it be immanent, within my lived experience? How can I relate to something that is completely other than me? How can it ‘in-exist’ in my mind? Is there an original ‘me’ or am I always the result of my social life? Is the world in which I am living objective, or is it just mine? In this paper I would like to answer all these questions, focusing on the theory of intersubjectivity as it has been displayed by Husserl’s phenomenological method. In several instances, this method was defined by Husserl himself as a “‘sociological’ transcendental philosophy” (Husserl, 1968: 539), or even as a “transcendental sociology” (Husserl, 1966: 220), for it looks into the lived experience of the subject as if the subject were a transcendental intersubjective unit. The Husserliana volumes we refer to throughout this work are: the Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl, 1982), which implicitly sends us to volume 8 (First Philosophy, second part & other important additions), and volumes 13 to 15 of the Husserliana (Husserl, 1973), which are dedicated especially to the issue of intersubjectivity. In what follows, I will focus firstly on the notion of intentionality, secondly on the constitution of the otherness and its objectivity, thirdly on the idea of ego and its life-world.

This book represents a unique indispensable reflection on the interconnection between empathy and ethics. To what extent is it right to be empathetic? Can empathy be unethical? Or is there an ethical obligation to be empathetic? Do we educate our citizens and train our professionals to use the right form of empathy? Phenomenological ethics is a relatively new approach to ethics whose emphasis is put on the description of the lived-experience and the ethical phenomenon. The essays offer phenomenological descriptions of the thorny problem pertaining to the interconnection of empathy and ethics essential for professionals and scholars of different fields, such as philosophy, psychiatry, health science, psychology, and sociology. _Contributors: _Michael Agostinelli Jr., Elodie Boublil, Francesca Brencio, Manuel Camassa, Scott D. Churchill, Nicolas de Warren, Craig Derksen, John J. Drummond, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, Jannik M. Hansen, Simon Høffding, Joel Krueger, Carlos Lobo, Esteban Marín-Ávila, Alexander Montes, Dermot Moran, Henning Nörenberg, Tone Roald, Eva Schwarz, Andrea Staiti, Joona Taipale, Stefano Vincini, Maren Wehrle, Dan Zahavi.