Susi Ferrarello

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.

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.

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.

This book provides an analysis of values and identity within the context of ancient, modern and contemporary philosophy. This issue is addressed from the viewpoints of intersubjective and individual experience. The contributors to this volume answer the following questions: What are the lived-meanings of "values" and "ethics" from a philosophical, sociological and psychological perspective? How does society constitute its own life-word? What is the meaning of values? What is the role of values in defining self-identity? How does their meaning change within a political context? Do politics and aesthetics affect our moral identity? What is the role of values in the state of nature? How does art accomplish its primary task: raising human consciousness over and against the reified world of commodities?This volume offers an opportunity to reflect on these issues from a philosophical point of view and to explore the dialogue of philosophy with sociology and psychology.

This book contains the most recent papers problematizing the notions of health, vulnerability, and well-being for individuals and their environment. Organized in 5 sections the book takes into consideration the critical and phenomenological history of well-being and health, their technological manipulation, how these notions connect with the body and the specific vulnerability of the human being, and what responsible direction we can take to improve people's relation to themselves, to other living beings and their environment. In order to address the issue of the vulnerability of the human world and how to respond to its specific challenges, the contributions in this book discuss the topic from a broad range of perspectives, including anthropological, psychological, sociological, philosophical, and environmental.

Hedwig Conrad-Martius was honoured with the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, on March 1st, 1958. What follows is her acceptance speech on that occasion. In this speech, Conrad-Martius not only gives an account of her biography as a phenomenologist who studied directly with Husserl, but also demonstrates that Husserl’s work is open to a peculiar form of subjective materialist interpretation that can explain his transcendental turn. The speech is an important document for those who support the possibility of a Husserlian transcendental materialism.