Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl’s relevance for phenomenological psychopathology and psychiatry hinges in part on the foundational and methodological aspects of his philosophy, as rooted both in Gestalt psychology and experimental phenomenology of perception and thought. A second distinctive reason for his persisting and increasing significance lies in his Socratic quest for the foundations of meaning, order, value, and coherence within ordinary experience, which still provide clinicians with concepts to focus abnormal patterns on all these parameters. Besides this twofold renewed framework of clinical theory, Husserl’s analyses of consciousness and personhood deliver a series of categories and distinctions still in use in best diagnostic and clinical practices.