Intentional Arc Research Articles

Disturbances of intentionality in schizophrenia and in depression

IntroductionIIntentionality constitutes an essential phenomenon of psychic life (Brentano, 1874; Husserl, 1917). Its disturbance can be expected in schizophrenia and depression.ObjectivesTo study how such fundamental psychic function is altered in these two diseases.MethodsPhenomenological method allows to deepen in the structure of complex phenomena. Husserl’s analysis of “consciousness of immanent time” helps in studying how intentionality functions in schizophrenia. In depression, we appeal to own previous phenomenological researches revealing three fundamental features: a specific change in body experience; inability to act, feel, think, etc. (inhibition); and alteration, inversion, and suspension of biorhythms.ResultsThe intentional arc connects the beginning and the end of a phrase. This arc will keep tenser, the bigger is the potency of the aim of my speech and my capacity to exclude inadequate associations. In schizophrenia intentional arc expands and appear “lax associations” (Bleuler, 1911) and “overinclusion” (Cameron, 1968). Fuchs (2005) argues that also the rest of schizophrenic symptoms represent disturbances of intentionality, e. g., in paranoid ideas an inversion occurs. In depression, its three essential phenomena can be interpreted as different forms of intentionality failure: the compromise of lived body and its consequent loss of transparence lead to incapacity of projecting oneself toward action and future. “Not being able to” (inhibition) means a detention of intentionality. Closely related appears the inability to anticipate. Finally, the alteration, inversion or suspension of biorhythms is temporal and insofar implicates a disturbance of intentionality.ConclusionsThe main features of schizophrenia and depression represent specific forms of alteration of intentionality.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Interpersonal Connectivity Work: Being there with and for geographically distant others

In this paper we ask how interpersonal connectivity can be achieved at a geographic distance. This is in contrast with extant literature that focuses on states of connectivity rather than the work needed to achieve it. We draw on phenomenological ideas of embodiment, presence and distance, in combination with empirical material from an extreme remote work context – telenursing in Australia. The nurses we interviewed triage patients entirely by telephone. We argue that even with low social and technical connectivity, interpersonal connectivity is achievable through skilful work with technology. We explore the work that goes into ‘being there with and for distant others’ by combining the phenomenological concepts of ‘maximal grip’ and ‘intentional arc’ with empirical examples. We propose that interpersonal connectivity is oriented empathetically towards both the other person and agentically towards the joint situation. We thereby develop a conceptual model of interpersonal connectivity work, which argues that distributed workers need to skilfully balance the dualities of freedom/control and nearness/farness to achieve interpersonal connectivity. Achieving and maintaining interpersonal connectivity is an important skill, particularly for leaders who operate in work contexts that are increasingly distributed, flexible and temporary.

Rejecting Dreyfus’ introspective ‘phenomenology’. The case for phenomenological analysis

I argue that Hubert Dreyfus’ work on embodied coping, the intentional arc, solicitations and the background as well as his anti-representationalism rest on introspection. I denote with ‘introspection’ the methodological malpractice of formulating ontological statements about the conditions of possibility of phenomena merely based on descriptions. In order to illustrate the insufficiencies of Dreyfus’ methodological strategy in particular and introspection in general, I show that Heidegger, to whom Dreyfus constantly refers as the foundation of his own work, derives ontological statements about the conditions of possibility of phenomena not merely from descriptions, but also from analyses. I further show that deriving ontological statements directly from descriptions entails implausible results. I do so by discussing representative cases. Based on these general methodological considerations, I show that Dreyfus’ work on action, skill and understanding is introspective. First, I demonstrate that Dreyfus’ influential claim that rules and representations do not govern skillful actions is the result of introspection, because it is merely founded on the absence of rules and representations in representative descriptions of skillful actions. Second, I show that Dreyfus’ work on embodied coping, the intentional arc, solicitations and the background is also based on introspection. These ontological structures are merely reifications of descriptions and are not further substantiated by analyses.

Bicycle kicks and camp sites: Towards a phenomenological theory of game feel with special attention towards ‘rhythm’

The goal of the article is to present a theory of game feel inspired by phenomenology. Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis and concept of time ( Sorge), as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Body-Subject including the related phenomena intentional arc, maximal grip and flow of coping, are of special interest. The aim is to move beyond the descriptive game design take on game feel by inserting the body in a first-person perspective, highlighting a sensuous approach with emphasis on rhythm and controller. We offer a methodological framework for analysing game feel consisting on three levels: ‘Dance’, ‘Learn’ and ‘Inhabit’. Finally, we arrive at an understanding of game feel explaining reasons for player sensitivity towards game feel and clues to why players care so deeply about it.

Response through the Intentional Arc: Merleau- Ponty, Dreyfus and Second Language Acquisition

Response through the Intentional Arc: Merleau- Ponty, Dreyfus and Second Language Acquisition

The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in investigations about medication use: constructing a methodological cascade.

Merleau-Ponty innovated when giving primacy to the body and perception in his philosophical proposal. Within the field of health, his thinking gives us access to the knowledge gained from the corporeality of individuals with chronic diseases. The objective of this study was to expand the understanding of phenomena associated with the daily use of medication, which includes increasingly complex drug regimes, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty. To this end, we described the research steps anchored in his phenomenological philosophy and structured them in the form of a cascade, beginning with the definition of phenomenology as a new form of epistemology, existence as a paradigm, and the body as a theory. Furthermore, the methodology included the use of existential structures, namely, time, space, relationships with others, and sexuality, connected through the intentional arc to reach an understanding of the phenomenon of medication use.

“Ir hacia” desde los otros. La apropiación de la noción de arco intencional en la teoría de Merleau-Ponty

Los objetivos de mi trabajo son: explorar la génesis de la función llamada “arco intencional” en la infancia, entenderla como un proceso de desarrollo paulatino y analizar los procesos intermedios (como la constitución del yo y la aparición del mundo de los objetos) que intervienen en su definición. Asimismo, intentaré demostrar que el concepto de arco intencional, aunque poco desarrollado por Merleau-Ponty, conlleva consecuencias que impregnan y sostienen gran parte de su teoría perceptual. Esclarecer la trama conceptual que lo fundamenta no sólo podrá arrojar luz sobre la génesis de la percepción en su teoría, sino que también aportará herramientas valiosas para explicar los inicios de la constitución del cuerpo habitual en la niñez.

Psychopathology and spiritual experiences: Criteria for differential assessment

IntroductionThere is a plurality of differing opinions defining borders between mental disorders and spiritual experiences. This research proposes criteria for clarifying those boundaries.ObjectivesSummarize practical criteria for clinicians to assess psychopathological symptoms with spiritual content and to attain a differential diagnosis from healthy spiritual experiences.AimsMerge different approaches from psychopathology, psychology of religion and religious studies to attain practical criteria.MethodsLiterature review using a phenomenological and critical approach.Results1. Severe psychiatric symptoms with religious content: (1) are usually in the context of personal impoverishment; (2) appear odd in cultural environments and within a person's biography; (3) do not enhance action or, in the phenomenological tradition, (4) these symptoms come from a weakening of the “intentional arc”. 2. A guiding map is suggested to evaluate spiritual expressions and their relationships with mild or moderate mental disorders and with mental health and personal growth. This map is developed by combining different traditions from the psychology of religion. 3. Psychiatric and psychological judgment of religious/spiritual experiences should be self-limited. There is a judgment about its content and about its validity or truth, which is only possible within the different spiritual traditions.ConclusionsPsychopathology establishes principles to discriminate some psychotic symptoms from healthy spiritual experiences. Psychology of religion offers some general rules to guide the psychological evaluation of spiritual beliefs and their influence on mental well-being and personal growth. This review opens fields for future research in relating psychopathology and the study of religious experience.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

New Issue to Modeling Intentionality in the Field of Consciousness

Brentano in 1870s was the first to introduce intentionality to mean “conscious of”. At the end of the 1960s, a version of this view was developed by analytic American philosophy to construct a theory of meaningful language. That led Dennett to claim that intentionality was mainly a feature of sentence, not mental states. In contrast, Searle in 1990s rejected the Brentanian thesis and explained intentionality by a biological naturalism. Thereafter, radical eliminativists such as Churchland claimed that all philosophical arguments merited replacement by neuroscientific knowledge. Unfortunately, very few neurophysiological studies attempted to scientifically tackle the problem raised by intentionality. The issue now emerging is a new conception of intentionality based on phenomenological, neurobiological and quantum theories, such as: 1) the notion of “intentional arc” proposed in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty; 2) the neurobiological and quantum model of Freeman, in which self-organizing pathways are accompanied by quantum transitions in controlling intentionality in brain; 3) the recent hypothesis that some visuo-motor neurons would be involved in controlling these self-organized pathways; 4) the quantum models of Vitiello and Globus, in which a thermofield (dissipative) system governs the dynamic dialog of dual quantum modes between environment and brain. Based on this conception of mind-world interactions, it implicitly appears that intentionality might be a fundamental force which draws us irreversibly towards the future. An alternative hypothesis based on this promising proposal is argued.

On being motivated

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being motivated or solicited to act has recently been the focus of extensive investigation, yet work on this topic has tended to take the general notion of being motivated for granted. In this paper, I shall outline an account of what it is to be motivated. In particular, I shall focus on the relation between the affective character of states of being motivated and their intentional content, i.e. how things appear to the agent. Drawing on Husserl’s discussion of perceptual awareness, I suggest that the intentional content of states of being motivated has a horizonal structure, in which both affective and perceptual features are implied. In states of being motivated, the agent becomes aware of certain possibilities for action, towards which they feel drawn. This structure is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “intentional arc” (1962, 136).

Temporality and psychopathology

The paper first introduces the concept of implicit and explicit temporality, referring to time as pre-reflectively lived vs. consciously experienced. Implicit time is based on the constitutive synthesis of inner time consciousness on the one hand, and on the conative–affective dynamics of life on the other hand. Explicit time results from an interruption or negation of implicit time and unfolds itself in the dimensions of present, past and future. It is further shown that temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity are closely connected: While implicit temporality is characterised by tacit bodily functioning and by synchronisation with others, explicit temporality arises with states of desynchronisation, that is, of a retardation or acceleration of inner time in relation to external or social processes. These states often bring the body to awareness as an obstacle as well. On this basis, schizophrenia and melancholic depression are investigated as paradigm cases for a psychopathology of temporality. Major symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder, thought insertion, hallucinations or passivity experiences may be regarded as manifesting a disturbance of the constitutive synthesis of time consciousness, closely connected with a weakening of the underlying pre-reflective self-awareness or ipseity. This results in a fragmentation of the intentional arc, a loss of self-coherence and the appearance of major self-disturbances. Depression, on the other hand, is mostly triggered by a desynchronisation from the social environment and further develops into an inhibition of the conative–affective dynamics of life. As will be shown, both mental illnesses bear witness of the close connection of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity.

Phenomenology and its application in medicine

Phenomenology is a useful methodology for describing and ordering experience. As such, phenomenology can be specifically applied to the first person experience of illness in order to illuminate this experience and enable health care providers to enhance their understanding of it. However, this approach has been underutilized in the philosophy of medicine as well as in medical training and practice. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of phenomenology to clinical medicine. In order to describe the experience of illness, we need a phenomenological approach that gives the body a central role and acknowledges the primacy of perception. I present such a phenomenological method and show how it could usefully illuminate the experience of illness through a set of concepts taken from Merleau-Ponty. His distinction between the biological body and the body as lived, analysis of the habitual body, and the notions of motor intentionality and intentional arc are used to capture the experience of illness. I then discuss the applications this approach could have in medicine. These include narrowing the gap between objective assessments of well-being in illness and subjective experiences which are varied and diverse; developing a more attuned dialogue between physicians and patients based on a thick understanding of illness; developing research methods that are informed by phenomenology and thus go beyond existing qualitative methods; and providing medical staff with a concrete understanding of the impact of illness on the life-world of patients.

Le rapport au monde dans la maladie d’Alzheimer. Pour une lecture plurielle

Moving from a research sponsored by France Alzheimer, the authors try to question the Alzheimer disease from an anthropological, phenomenological and psychoanalytical point of view. This pathology has been always considered only from a neurological perspective, but it seems to us to be more complex, since it is the whole human being to be affected in it. The relationship to the world, the fear against death, the impossibility to afford the assumption of our fragilities, the signs of our finitude through time, the difficulty to accept the experience of the being out of step of our body show that the human singularity is affected by the Alzheimer disease. The intentional arc (tension) giving life to our existence is almost broken under the weight of an insurmountable anguish.

메를로-퐁티의 감각이론과 골프지도에서의 실천적 지식

The purpose of this study is to clarify the main characteristics of practical knowledge in golf teaching based on Merleau-Ponty`s phenomenology of sensitive perception. Merleau-Ponty criticizes an intellectual model for explicating acquisition of skill in practice, and suggests a practical knowledge based on central notions of his phenomenology of embodiment, namely schema of body(habitual knowledge) and intentional arc. The schema of body is understood as a way that my body is situated and dwells in the world. The intentional arc based on the embodiment signifies the interconnection of skillful action and perception. So, practical knowledge in golf teaching has to get sensibility and skillful technology that is based on habitual action. but nowadays, most of golfers and instructors relying to heavily on mechanism training. So, this paper makes that these central notions of the embodiment in Merleau-Ponty`s the theory of sensibility can provide an alternative theoretical basis for the understanding of practical knowledge in golf. Finally, for getting practical knowledge, we have to exercise steadily on actual fighting and then, even though we don`t know how to make it mechanical process, we need to get more skillful training.

Understanding end-of-life caring practices in the emergency department: developing Merleau-Ponty's notions of intentional arc and maximum grip through praxis and phronesis

The emergency department (ED) is a fast-paced, highly stressful environment where clinicians function with little or suboptimal information and where time is measured in minutes and hours. In addition, death and dying are phenomena that are often experienced in the ED. Current end-of-life care models, based on chronic illness trajectories, may be difficult to apply in the ED. A philosophical approach examining end-of-life care may help us understand how core medical and nursing values are embodied as care practices and as ethical comportment. The integration of Aristotle's notions of phronesis and praxis with Merleau-Ponty's ontological notions of intentional arc and maximum grip in the context of the culture and practices of the ED offers a unique view of clinical and ethical practice at the end-of-life in the emergency setting. Caring for people at the end-of-life calls us to act virtuously based on previous experience, meanings and local practices. The maximum grip of the ultimate particulars of the situation combined with one's experiential and theoretical knowledge opens up situated possibilities for the expert clinician.

Intelligence without representation – Merleau-ponty's critique of mental representation the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored”, not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.

Skills, spills and the nature of mindful action

Hubert Dreyfus offers a potent and important challenge to the fans of internal representation. Learning and skillful action, Dreyfus argues, can be effectively explained “without recourse to mind or brain representations” (p. ?). In place of internally represented knowledge we are to imagine experience as leading to fine-grained dispositions to respond to the precise details of the current situation. Thus tuned, the expert practitioner is keyed to the world in which she must live and act. This tight fit (Merleau-Ponty’s “intentional arc”) is not magical, but neither does it require us to posit anything worth calling “internal representations”. Instead, it can be fully explained and understood by reference to artificial neural networks and recent accounts of brain dynamics. As some of you might guess, I rather like this story. But I have two misgivings. First, I think it moves too quickly from the rejection of inner propositional data structures to the rejection (in these cases) of anything worth calling internal representation . Second, and relatedly, I think it calls for a long, difficult and overdue discussion of the very idea of mindful action. For it seems unclear, on Dreyfus’ account, where mind, cognition and intelligence stop and the nonmental world begins.

Merleau‐Ponty and Bourdieu on Embodied Significance

In this paper I identify embodied significance as an important theme in the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, and attempt to show that they entertain complementary conceptions of the living body as a form of significance. First, I review versions of embodied significance in the work of the two thinkers: concepts such as habitus, phenomenal body, and intentional arc are considered as renditions of of the effectual reality of embodied significance. Next, I discuss how the introduction of embodied significance affects our conception of social reality: being a hybrid concept, it projects a fusion between reason proper and its absence, onto a number of received conceptual distinctions such as reason/action, plan/execution, expression/silence. I conclude the first part of the paper (sections I-III), placing embodied significance in a relation of meaningful exchange-in a tacit dialogue-with an intentionally charged surrounding world. After establishing the common ground between the two thinkers' perspectives, I attempt to synthesize their points of divergence towards mutual complementation (section IV): Merleau-Ponty recovers the philosophical dimensions of issues only hinted at, yet widely employed, in Bourdieu's work; in particular, he acknowledges cmbodied significance as a pivotal theoretical issue, and sees it as coextensive with a non-representational layer of intentionality. On the other hand, Bourdieu provides Merleau-Ponty's perspective with socio-political concreteness and relevance; he elaborates on the political functions and effects of embodied significance, employing in the context of social analysis concepts which may be traced in Merleau-Ponty's work in an embryonic and largely a-political form.

The "Human" Voices in Hallucinations

AbstractSchizophrenic hallucinations can be understood only as a function of the totality of the schizophrenic's personality, that is, only in the context of the person's entire being-in-the-world. For essential reasons, there is a predominance of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia, and these typically take the form of human voices. This paper argues that the essential reasons here are human reasons. That is, hallucinations arise primarily on account of a human or personal deficit. We argue that the deficit in question is, most fundamentally, the radical one of a disturbed relation between the subject and the world in general. The schizophrenic slackens the normal "intentional arc" (Merleau-Ponty) that casts the subject out into a world. Our thesis is that this slackening has interpersonal roots and that hallucination can be understood as a desperate attempt to compensate for the impoverishment of being-in-the-world and, specifically, for the deficiency in human relations; hence, the "human" voices.

A Genetic (Psychological) Phenomenology of Perception

AbstractThis paper focuses on the concept of the "intentional arc" in Merleau-Ponty, who maintains that perception comes into play within, and is nourished by, an already established relation between the person and the world. That obscure relation, the intentional arc, is the "genesis" of perception, and this paper argues that in it resides the proper theme of a psychological phenomenology of perception. A study of the intentional arc shows that perception is not a passive, causal, impersonal process. On the contrary, perception is active in that it requires the perceiver's free consent to the solicitations stemming from the world; it is thus only motivated or beckoned, but not caused; and it rests on a personal foundation, which is to say that it depends on the entire psychological life of the perceiver. A subsequent paper will enrich and develop the implications of this thesis by taking up the phenomenology of hallucinations.