Aleksandar Fatic

The book addresses the growing interconnectedness between philosophical counseling and traditional psychotherapy. It explores the organic links between core philosophical concepts and theories, and the corresponding problems and theories in psychotherapy. Aleksandar Fatic focuses on the use of modal logic as a foundation for psychotherapy within the proposed Modal Integrative Psychotherapy model. The book functions both as a research work and a manual for the development and application of integrative psychotherapy, viewed through the lens of philosophical counseling and the exploration of the logical underpinnings of psychotherapy as its conceptual foundation.

The paper deals with the phenomenology of empathy as a particular attitude, but also as an ethical principle. The authors draw a distinction between two key conceptualizations of empathy in recent philosophy: (1) the one that sees empathy as a sort of “fusion” or the interpenetration of emotions of the observer, and the person who the observer empathizes with; this view of empathy derives mainly from the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment and in particular David Hume; and (2) the one that understands empathy as the ability to sympathize with others, whilst maintaining a clear awareness that the primary emotions of the person empathized with are not our emotions, or the emotions of the observer who empathizes. The latter view of empathy is perhaps first attributable to Max Scheler, and has recently been experimentally supported by Martin Hoffman in his research on empathy in overall moral development. The authors presently argue that the latter concept presents empathy as a relational emotion (emotion that concerns the substantive emotions of other people). They distinguish between relational emotions and meta-emotions, namely the emotions we feel concerning our other emotions. Further, the authors argue that relational emotions are a foundation for sentimentalist ethics, which can support the principle of moral obligation or duty. The text goes on to show why the notion of an organic community, based on the model of a functional group whose relations do not have to be mediated by institutional processes, is in itself a favourable context for improving mental well-being and establishing resistance mechanisms that characterize the very conceptualization of mental health. The authors believe that empathy contributes to individual and collective resilience not by denying individual vulnerability, but transforming it into predispositions for leadership based on emotionality and perception, even of institutions and corporate structures, as “small societies” in which the same types of social capital as in organic communities play a key role, above all moral emotions such as trust, empathy and solidarity.

Abstract:In this paper, I suggest that the moral incompetence in narcissism is associated with a particular type of emotional incompetence, namely the incompetence to experience the moral emotions, such as empathy, solidarity, loyalty, or love. I then move on to discussing the ethical ramifications of this incompetence, primarily from the point of view of sentimentalist ethics, and conclude that emotional incompetence does not in fact reduce the moral responsibility of a narcissist person, whether diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or not. My argument is based on the three criteria of moral responsibility proposed by Philip Pettit, namely those of value relevance, value judgment, and value sensitivity. I suggest that a sentimentalist ethical perspective entails that the satisfaction of two of the mentioned criteria (awareness of the social meaning of one’s choices and sufficient control of one’s actions) constitutes a moral obligation for the agent to satisfy the third criterion, namely to develop the appropriate moral sensibility and competence to actually choose morally correctly. This type of structure of obligation elucidates why narcissism is at the same time a moral failure and a psychopathology. At the same time, my argument portrays narcissism as a particular type of personality disturbance that almost uniquely reaffirms the role of moral re-education as the psychotherapeutic approach. This conclusion points to a potential revival of some of the precepts of Pinel’s affective psycho-pathology, dating back to the very beginnings of the psychotherapeutic clinic.

The conclusion summarizes the ways in which Modal Integrative Psychotherapy (MIP) may be seen as revolutionizing conventional psychotherapy by introducing the idea of “switching modal worlds”, not just within the subjectivity of the client, but also “worlds”, as sets of circumstances described in modal logic, within which subjective experience occurs. Such a shift of emphasis from an essentially subjectivist position to a fundamentally more ambitious conceptual approach to both lived experience and psychotherapy challenges certain conventional norms, including the blurring of the distinction between “reality” and “subjectivity” and the notion of how different experiential worlds might or might not be called into actual experience by the use of MIP technique.

Joseph Agassi’s last book, The Philosophy of Practical Affairs, offers a comprehensive look at key philosophical topics and doctrines with a common focus on the role of rationality, the evolution of rationality and the relationship between rationality and akin phenomena. A key topic he addresses is the relationship between rationality and magic. This dichotomy reverberates on a number of areas of applied philosophy, including philosophical practice and philosophically informed psychotherapy. Agassi’s views on magic offer a fundamentally rationalist view of the phenomenon of magic, however they open up significant inroads into nuanced insights of how magic can be seen as a cognitively significant complement to rationality in the strict sense.

The paper examines the concept of individual and collective value identities based an emotionalist understanding of values. The main perspective it discusses is one where emotions are the most important practical instruments for the clarification of individual and collective values. The argument implies that moral emotions are not irrational, but have a logic of their own which can reliably pinpoint the persons’ value system; emotions are thus crucial building blocks of an ethics which is able to enhance personal and moral identity. This particular ecology of moral emotions is pivotal in crisis periods, such as the global pandemics, wars or system crashes, either economic, or political, security, diplomatic or cultural. In the current circumstances, where the already shaken individual and collective values throughout the world have been shaken by the Covid 19 pandemic, understanding identities as fundamentally couched in moral emotions may be critical to saving our cultures and our legacies of social and moral capital.

This chapter focuses on how language, and what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “language games”, are factored into everyday thinking, psychotherapeutic interventions, and the modal theory of therapy. The way in which psychological structures that are reflected in language are played out in the therapeutic narrative reveals not just the difficulties faced by the person in therapy, but also the moral assumptions and confusion that require a particular philosophical resolution in the intimate community between the therapist and client. The chapter discusses how the nature of therapeutic community as a value community influences the client’s and the therapist’s perceptions and use of language and, in turn, how the growing quality and intimacy of that community is articulated in the therapeutic narrative.

The paper deals with a perspective of Christian philosophy on artificial memory erasuse for psychotherapeutic purposes. Its central question is whether a safe and reliable technology of memory erasure, once it is available, would be acceptable from a Christian ethics point of view. The main facet of this question is related to the Christian ethics requirement of contrition for the past wrongs, which in the case of memory erasure of particulary troubling experiences and personal choices would not be possible. The paper argues that there are limits to the ethical significance of contrition in the writings of the leading Christian fathers on the theme, where excessive suffering and inability to forgive oneself for one’s actions is an impediment to the achivement of tranquility of mind and spiritual redemption, rather than a prerequisite for it. The paper thus concludes that there is no hindrance in principle from the Christian ethics point of view to pursuing a voluntary and selective memory erasure as a psychotherapeutic technique once a fully adequate technology is available.

The paper discusses the conceptualisation of mental disorder as a representation, rather than an illness, and relates this perspective to the modern understanding of mental health as a healthy »narrative« or life story. The author proceeds to briefly consider the evolution of concepts of illness in psychiatry and a gradual reappearance of Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The key concepts of Lacanian psychotherapy pave the way to a growing together of standard psychotherapy and modern philosophical practice within the novel concept of integrative psychotherapy.