A meta-analysis of the core essence of psychopathological entities: an historical exercise in phenomenological psychiatry

Abstract

Two fundamentally different approaches among phenomenological psychopathologists can be discerned. One is what we call fixed essentialism, where the pathognomonic element of, say, schizophrenia is conceived of as a single, enduring and intrinsically morbid way of grasping all entities in the world, including self and body. The other, which we call dialectical essentialism, accounts for the same manifestations of, say, schizophrenia, but through a process which is not life-enduring, and, most critically vis-à-vis the former formulation, is not in itself a single morbid defect: a morbid pattern of world, self and body is achieved by an imbalance between two or more otherwise healthy constituents of the ‘normal’ human being, whose imbalance and attempts to resolve this – the dialectic – induce the ‘morbidity’.