Rodrigo Becerra

In order to understand consciousness one would benefit from developing a more eclectic intellectual style. Consciousness is, as proposed by almost everyone except the stubborn reductionists, a truly mysterious concept. Its study and dissection merits a multidisciplinary approach. Waving this multidisciplinary flag has positively enlarged the discussion and neurologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on, have moved to the philosophy of mind arena, first with caution and now with a more powerful voice. Identifying what we mean by consciousness is a first step even when we want to deny its existence. The link between consciousness and some other mental activity is a logical next step and there is abundant literature doing this, but not all of them differentiate among associated yet different phenomena.

Whilst individuals deal with divergent sorts of stimuli from the environment, they also tend to display some regularity in the way they respond to related patterns. These consistent responses can be conceptualised as cognitive schemas. A paramount component of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is the notion of cognitive schemas as they are a favoured point of therapeutic intervention. CBT as articulated by Beck in the 1960s owes intellectual acknowledgment to Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger and their notions of “atmosphere” and “clearing” respectively. This essay explores the notion of cognitive schema and atmosphere as applied to emotional pathology. It suggests that the well-known influence that phenomenology had on existential psychology could be extended to empirical clinical psychology, like CBT. The strategy adopted in this paper is to use Dreyfus’ ontological and epistemological distinction in psychopathology and then make a similar distinction, albeit using different terminology, in the CBT tradition. Some empirical findings from the literature are examined which render support to the existence of cognitive schemas and their crucial contributory role in the aetiology and maintenance of emotional disorders. It is noted that some of the features of these cognitive schemas were espoused well before Beck by Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenological-existential tradition. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 4, Edition 1 July 2004.