La question du corps, Husserl et Binswanger

Abstract

Historical links between genetic phenomenology and phenomenological psychiatry stemming from Binswanger's works have recently been updated. As a consequence, a philosophy of body based upon the distinction between Lieb (lived body or flesh) and Körper (physical body), becomes genuinely meaningful. The flesh ( chair) becomes the root source of a genesis, of the an-egoïcal experience, upon which subjectivity and intersubjectivity will be founded. Contemporary phenomenological studies (É. Escoubas, N. Depraz, M. Richir), focusing on genetic phenomenology, allow for a new approach of Binswanger's works in line with psychiatric research (W. Blankenburg, A. Tatossian). Clinical studies show how the experience of flesh expresses itself through delusional experience, as if psychosis empirically catalyzed the unveiling of forming or dissolving transcendental structures. The passive syntheses of temporal order, anterior to the subjec–object distinction, emerge through failures. Thus a differential analysis between phenomenological philosophy and psychiatry becomes possible. A phenomenological description assumes a reflexive framework through the reduction of the natural experience; the clinical description, in Binswanger's words, tries to grasp the psychotic phenomena as a nature's experience. This double viewpoint confirms that the anthropological dimension takes precedence. The question of body, in phenomenological psychiatry's perspective, evolves in relation to a continuum where variations between biology, psychology and anthropology merge. Phenomenology acknowledges and assumes this complexity.