The Lived Space of Ana: a Clinical Case Study from the Perspective of Phenomenological Psychopathology

Abstract

Panic disorder is composed of a set of anxiety disorders that inhibit the individual from moving because of a state of terror that is established. In order to approach this psychopathological phenomenon, it is important to understand the modes of being that configure it. A deeper place is found in the changes of time, body, space, and the subject’s relationship with others and with the world. The alteration in the space lived, the object of this article, manifests itself in aspects of the exhaustion of becoming and is revealed through the harm caused by the subject’s proximity to the world. There is a change in the fundamental relation of man to the world, which sustains the possibilities of power and becoming in the particular acts of each subject. With this, we propose to discuss the notion of the space lived through the analysis of a single clinical case of a patient diagnosed with panic disorder. We find that the patient’s lived world and the things that surround it are isolated, immobile, and out of reach. This detachment is experienced as a loss of spatial depth. The world becomes terrifying, paralyzing and inhibits the performance of any genuine action from the patient.