The Phenomenological Aspects of Mental Disorders

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present the principal features of an “existential phenomenology” represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This philosophical trend (one cannot refer to it as a system with a complete, definite nature), which gained enormous popularity in the late forties and early fifties of this century, seems to have exerted a great influence on the emergence of a new kind of psychiatry. The “humanist outbreak”1 (to use Sasz’s term) is closely linked to the theory of the human project and “the desire to be”.2 We are of the opinion that the description as well as the analysis of human consciousness — propounded by Sartre and to some extent by Merleau-Ponty — helped to bring about substantial changes and transformations in so far as the attitude towards “deranged people” was concerned, closely following Brentano’s “axiom” concerning the nature of conscious acts, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty promptly accepted the advanced forms of phenomenology taught and studied under Edmund Husserl. For new followers such as the French group, it appeared evident that acts of awareness must — by their nature — “have” an object.