Kevin Aho

Written in a jargon-free way, Body Matters provides a clear and accessible phenomenological critique of core assumptions in mainstream biomedicine and explores ways in which health and illness are experienced and interpreted differently in various socio-historical situations. By drawing on the disciplines of literature, cultural anthropology, sociology, medical history, and philosophy, the authors attempt to dismantle common presuppositions we have about human afflictions and examine how the methods of phenomenology open up new ways to interpret the body and to re-envision therapy.

The instrumental classification of depression made possible by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the widespread pharmacological approach to treatment in mainstream biopsychiatry has generated a cottage industry of criticism. This paper explores the potential shortcomings of the DSM/bio-psychiatric model and introduces the value of philosophical counseling—specifically by means of integrating the insights of Existentialism and Buddhism—as a way to overcome a number of diagnostic and methodological problems. Philosophical counseling, in this regard, is not overly concerned with the objective question of “What we are?” as biophysical beingswith overt behaviors but with a more fundamental question, namely, “How we are?” that is, how do we experience our existence as finite, impermanent beings, how does this experience shape and determine depressive episodes, and how can we come to accept our own finitude and impermanence?

This short essay offers a critical overview of David Nowell Smith's book Sounding/Silence, focusing on, what the author calls, the “ontologization of poetry” as a way to grasp Heidegger's critique of traditional aesthetics and the novel claim that the human body is already implicated in Heidegger's account of language and poetry. To this end, there is a brief discussion of Heidegger's controversial views on the human/animal relation, the connection between poetry and thinking, and the value of Heidegger's poetics for future scholarship in the area.

With the increasingly close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) there has been a growing tendency in the mental health professions to interpret everyday emotional suffering and behavior as a medical condition that can be treated with a particular drug. In this paper, I suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology is uniquely suited to challenge the core assumptions of medicalization by expanding psychiatry's narrow conception of the self as an enclosed, biological individual and recognizing the ways in which our experience of things--including mental illness--is shaped by the socio-historical situation in which we grow. Informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, psychiatry's first priority is to suspend the prejudices that come with being a medical doctor in order to hear what the patient is saying. To this end, psychiatry can begin to understand the patient not as a static, material body with a clearly defined brain dysfunction but as an unfolding, situation existence already involved in an irreducibly complex social world, an involvement that allows the patient to experience, feel, and make sense of their emotional suffering.

Dostoevsky's disturbing and groundbreaking novella appears in this new annotated edition with an Introduction by Charles Guignon and Kevin Aho. An analogue of Guignon's widely praised Introduction to his 1993 edition of "The Grand Inquisitor," the editors' Introduction places the underground man in the context of European modernity, analyzes his inner dynamics in the light of the history of Russian cultural and intellectual life, and suggests compelling reasons for our own strange affinity for this nameless man who boldly declares, "I was rude and took pleasure in being so.”

This paper integrates personal narratives with the methods of phenomenology in order to draw some general conclusions about ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be depressed. The analysis has three parts. First, it explores the ways in which depression disrupts everyday experiences of spatial orientation and motility. This disruption makes it difficult for the person to move and perform basic functional tasks, resulting in a collapse or contraction of the life-world. Second, it illustrates how depression creates a situational atmosphere of emotional indifference that reduces the person’s ability to qualitatively distinguish what matters in his or her life because nothing stands out as significant or important anymore. In this regard, depression is distinct from other feelings because it is not directed towards particular objects or situations but to the world as a whole. Finally, the paper examines how depression diminishes the possibility for ‘self-creation’ or ‘self-making’. Restricted by the illness, depression becomes something of a destiny, preventing the person from being open and free to access a range of alternative self-interpretations, identities, and possible ways of being-in-the-world.