Broken Tool or Disordered Existence? The Problem of Mental Illness in Existencial Phenomenology

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Marcelo Vieira
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Phenomenology, Humanities and Sciences
• Texto Completo: https://phenomenology.com.br/index.php/phe/article/view/78
• topic: Psiquiatria; Heidegger; Sentimentos Existenciais; Normatividade; Psychiatry; Heidegger; Existential feelings; Normativity; Psiquiatría; Heidegger; Sentimientos existenciales; Normatividad

According to Schmid (2018) Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology pro-vides an accurate way to describe mental illness from an experiential point of view. Mental illness is addressed as a series of disruptions in the practical and social structures of existen-ce, by analogy with the broken tool analysis as presented in Being and Time. In this paper, I propose an analysis of Schmid’s reading in three steps: 1. I maintain that her reading implies both a categorial transgression and a functionalist perspective, both of which derive from the mistaken use of the broken tool analogy; 2. Disruptions in the practical and social structures of existence do not seem sufficient for the manifestation of mental illness; and 3. I maintain that rule-following disturbances are closely linked to the experience of illness, but just as a conse-quence of that experience. Next, I introduce an approach to the mentally ill self-understanding prior to the thematization of rule-following disturbances. I conclude by suggesting that a dis-ruption in the modal space of experience linked to affective changes plays an important role in understanding mental illness from an existential-phenomenological perspective.