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In this paper, I draw on Heidegger's phenomenology of "moods" (Stimmungen) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger's account of the affective "collapse" or "breakdown" (Zusammenbruch) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often said today that we live in the "Age of Rage." This article explores the phenomenon of modern rage through an analysis of the psychic conflicts of Dostoevsky's "underground man," as he tries to reconcile the newly imported values of modernity with his own needs and desires. By interpreting rage through the classic Greek notion of the daimonic, the author examines how the modern attempt to rationally control and suppress rage actually exacerbates the underground man's destructive, cruel, and self-defeating behavior and cuts him off from the possibility of emotional connectivity and wholeness. He concludes by pointing to some therapeutic possibilities within the tradition of existential psychotherapy that might have allowed the underground man to better understand and heal himself by recognizing the daimonic roots of his own rage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Davis' suggestion appears to be that if the architects of the DSM had written the clinical criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder in the nineteenth century - with the condition's intrusive thoughts and repetitive, driven behaviors - it would have been viewed positively, as a marker of social and moral virtue. Towards the end of the book, Davis turns his attention to the clinical pioneer of obsession, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. As Davis' pioneering book continues to show us, obsession is not a discrete medical entity; it is a set of embedded affects and behaviors that are always open to reconfiguration and reinterpretation over time. [Extracted from the article]

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger's account of human existence (or Dasein) as a point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability 'to be' because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an 'ontological death' in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank's (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of 'ontological death' and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger's conception of 'resoluteness' (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of the medical-model in American psychiatry over the last 30 years has resulted in the subsequent decline of the 'talking cure'. In this paper, we identify a number of problems associated with medicalized psychiatry, focusing primarily on how it conceptualizes the self as a de-contextualized set of symptoms. Drawing on the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, we argue that medicalized psychiatry invariably overlooks the fact that our identities, and the meanings and values that matter to us, are created and constituted by our dialogical relations with others. While acknowledging the importance of medical and pharmaceutical interventions, we suggest that it is only by means of the dialogical interplay of the talking cure that the client can both recognize unhealthy and self-defeating ways of being and be opened up to the possibility of new meanings and self-interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is said today that we live in the "Age of Rage." This paper explores the phenomenon of modern rage through an analysis of the psychic conflicts of Dostoevsky's underground man as he tries to reconcile the newly imported values of modernity with his own irrational needs and desires. By interpreting rage through the Greek notion of the daimonic, I examine how the modern attempt to rationally control and suppress rage and violence actually exacerbates the underground man's cruel and self-destructive behavior and cuts him off from the possibility of emotional connectivity and wholeness. I conclude by pointing to some therapeutic possibilities within the tradition of existential and phenomenological psychotherapy that might allow the underground man to understand himself by recognizing the sources of his own rage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has recently pathologized shyness as a mental disorder. This paper argues that the medicalization of shyness tells us more about who we are in late modernity than it does about any internal dysfunction. Drawing on the insights of hermeneutic philosophy, the paper challenges the configuration of the self offered by medical models and recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and argues that diagnostic psychiatry and contemporary American identity in general is already being shaped by a background of socio-historical meanings that are producing a more assertive, competitive, and gregarious self. By failing to acknowledge this hermeneutic background--one that determines why certain kinds of dispositions matter to us in the first place--I suggest that American psychiatry may be unwittingly constructing the very behaviors it is seeking to treat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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, situated 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on the unique velocity and over-stimulation of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel pioneered an interpretation of cultural boredom that has had a significant impact on contemporary social theory by viewing it through the modern experience of time-pressure and social acceleration. This paper explores Simmel's account of boredom by showing how—in the frenzy of modern life—it has become increasingly difficult to qualitatively distinguish which choices and commitments actually matter to us. Furthermore, this emotional indifference invariably pushes us towards more excessive and risky behavior, towards, what I call, “extreme aeshesia.” Insofar as novel experiences quickly become routine in the technological age, it appears that only extreme sensations and experiences can break the spell of boredom, allowing us to momentarily feel strongly for something. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many critics have attempted to give an account of a gendered incarnation of Dasein in response to Heidegger's "neutral" or "asexual" interpretation. In this paper, I suggest gendered readings of Dasein are potentially misleading. I argue Dasein is gendered only to the extent that "the Anyone" (das Man)--understood as relational background of social practices, institutions, and languages--constitutes the space or "clearing" (Luhtung) of intelligibility. However, this reading misrepresents the core motivation of Heidegger's early project, namely to arrive at "temporality" (Zeitlichkeit) as the original source of any intelligibility whatsoever. For Heidegger, Dasein is to be understood in terms of the twofold movement of being "thrown" into the Past (Vergangenheit) and "projecting" into the Future (Zukunft). It is only the basis of the neutral temporal structures of "thrown projection" that beings can emerge-into-presence as such, enabling us to make sense of our Present (Gegenwart) gendered practices in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his Contributions to Philosophy, Martin Heidegger (1999) introduces ‘acceleration’ as one of the three symptoms — along with ‘calculation’ and the ‘outbreak of massiveness’ ‘ of our technological way of ‘being-in-the-world’. In this article, I unpack the relationship between these symptoms and draw a twofold conclusion. First, interpreting acceleration in terms of time pathologies, I suggest the self is becoming increasingly fragmented and emotionally overwhelmed from chronic sensory arousal and time pressure. This experience makes it difficult for us to qualitatively distinguish what matters to us in our everyday lives, resulting in a pervasive cultural mood of indifference, what Heidegger (1995) calls ‘profound boredom’. Second, by drawing on Heidegger's hermeneutic method, I argue that the practice of mainstream psychology, by adopting the reductive methodology of the empirical sciences, largely ignores our accelerated socio-historical situation, resulting in therapeutic models that have a tendency to construct and perpetuate the very pathologies the psychologist is seeking to treat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the parallels between the translated "Zollikon Seminars," by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Comparison between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's account of the human body; Analysis of pertinent topics and relevant issues; Implications on studies of the body and society.

The instrumental classification of depression made possible by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) 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 beings with 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? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]