Kinesthesias and Horizons in Psychosis

Abstract

This presentation grows out of an abiding interest in Husserlian phenomenology, and the wish to articulate my present understanding of psychosis. What I would like to do is relate my acquaintance with each to that of the other, believing that each may be of value for disclosing something of the other. Such an undertaking which starts from the psychotic condition as a constituted subjectivity is one of an hyletic, and not a pure, transcendental phenomenology (Hua., 3: 214–15). There is of course an initial price to be paid for such an hyletic emphasis within an attitude oriented to a pure phenomenology. Yet if phenomenology is to realize its ties with philosophical praxis — and this involves its biological relevance in the broadest human sense — then it must be willing to take the risk of starting from below, again and again. Hence its necessarily fragmentary appearance in the context of classical philosophy. This also makes it possible for breaks in our ongoing experience to become occasions for developing enhanced intelligibility. Husserl, in a 1926–27 lecture, put it like this:

The world and we under abstraction from individual and collective death? The ideality — the open horizons, the indefinite possibility, that it can keep on in the same way, that I can keep right on unhindered. Horizons, on which I practically count, with counter-possibilities not currently indicated. But they are present — Horizon above all carries with it the real possibility of break, indeed it is real, the break is not merely possible in phantasy. Consequently a phenomenology of the irrationalities in contrast to, and correlative with, one of rationalities, of idealities.

but the irrationality as possibility remains itself subject to rational consideration. The relations between ideality and irrational facticity are also subject to laws of essential being. (Hua., 14: 561)