This innovative book offers a multidimensional exploration of the epistemological foundations of psychiatry and its major disorders. By emphasizing the importance of phenomenology in unravelling the intricate interplay between basic categories of human experience and neurobiological processes, it advocates for a shift in both psychiatric research and clinical practice. Phenomenological Neuropsychiatry presents psychiatry as a hybrid discipline that synthesizes subjective mental experiences with objective neuroscientific findings and forms an integrative and interdisciplinary structure that provides a dialectical bridge between understanding, compassion, and explanation.
The first section of the book presents the lived experience of psychosis and argues for a more inclusive approach to mental health issues. The second section examines the ways in which psychiatric knowledge is constructed and the unique challenges posed by combining understanding and explanation of mental disorders. Section three sheds light on how disruptions in bodily experiences, memory processes, and self-perception can contribute to the development and manifestation of psychiatric issues. The following section discusses disorders of mood and anxiety, including the phenomena of depression, obsessions, and depersonalization. The fifth and final section provides an in-depth examination of psychotic disorders. It covers a range of topics, such as timing, intentionality, self-monitoring of action in schizophrenia, and the neurobiology of prodromal psychosis. As a singular work dedicated to revitalizing and advancing cross-fertilization between psychiatry and phenomenology, this groundbreaking book clears the foggy operationalized clusters of mental symptoms that may obscure diagnosis and treatment and argues for systematic integration of patient subjectivity and collaboration in clinical research. It features an authorship of the leading clinicians and thinkers from throughout the world in psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, social sciences, and philosophy. Phenomenological Neuropsychiatry: How Patient Experience Bridges the Clinic with Clinical Neuroscience is a major contribution to the clinical literature and a must-read for psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists, and professionals and students from other disciplines concerned with absorbing a deeper understanding of psychiatric disorders.
Author Biography:
Aaron L. Mishara, PhD., Psy.D is a retired Full Professor of Clinical Psychology at The Chicago School who researched altered states of consciousness, time perception, memory systems and psychosis, and the psychology of art and narrative. Dr. Mishara studied symptoms of psychiatric disorders and cognition at Yale School of Medicine. He currently examines the contribution of phenomenology and automatic processing in relation to neurobiological and neurocomputational models in psychiatry. Prior to the above, Dr. Mishara received two Fulbright-Hays grants to examine phenomenological-descriptive approaches in Germany, working with leading phenomenologists including Wolfgang Blankenburg and Hans George Gadamer. Returning stateside, he studied time perception in persons with schizophrenia at Daniel Weinberger’s lab at NIMH and participated in Mark Hallett’s (NINDS/NIH) study of functional neurological disorder. Dr. Mishara has lectured around the world and has published approximately 100 publications, including “Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain” which has been downloaded over 33,000 times since its initial publication in 2010.
Marcin Moskalewicz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Maria Curie Skłodowska University in Lublin and Poznan University of Medical Sciences as well as Team Leader at IDEAS NCBR in Warsaw (all in Poland). He is convener of the Phenomenology and Mental Health Network, The Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Moskalewicz was Marie Curie Fellow at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and University of Oxford, EURIAS Fellow at Collegium Helveticum in Zurich, Fulbright Scholar at Texas A&M, and Humboldt Fellow at Heidelberg University.
Michael Alan Schwartz, MD is retired as Joint Professor of Psychiatry and Humanities in Medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Medicine. A Board-Certified Psychiatrist, he is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the journal Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine. Presently Dr. Schwartz continues practicing psychiatry as well as writing and editing psychiatric books and articles. His work focuses on advancing pluralistic, person and people-centered approaches to psychiatric assessment, care and treatment.
Alexander Kranjec studied philosophy at Grinnell College as an undergraduate, received his PhD in experimental psychology from the City University of New York, and worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Neurology Department and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he is an associate professor of Psychology at Duquesne University, adjunct faculty at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, and a Community Member of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent his sabbatical as a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Dr. Kranjec is the director of the Art & Language Lab at Duquesne University. He has published extensively on topics pertaining to spatial & temporal cognition, language, and aesthetics.
