Brain Sciences
May 1, 2026
Giovanni Stanghellini
This review explores the hypothesis that schizophrenic symptoms may be understood not as isolated deficits, but as interconnected manifestations of a structural reorganization of consciousness. The premises of this work are grounded in a comparative matrix that suggests an underlying "consanguinity" between the philosopher's voluntary epoché-the suspension of the natural attitude performed to...
Psychopathology
February 2, 2026
Riccardo Poggioli, Giovanni Stanghellini
This paper proposes a critical expansion of phenomenological psychopathology of the individual to explicitly integrate the collective dimension. In order to accurately describe the scenario of collective life, and its relationship with the psychology and psychopathology of individual existences, we propose two moves: (1) A shift of focus from society (which denotes an organized aggregate of...
Eating and weight disorders : EWD
July 8, 2025
Giovanni Stanghellini
1 citation
This paper examines transgressive eroticism-specifically the phenomenon of "Overlove"-as an experiential field that both constructs and dissolves embodied selfhood. It asks how hyper-intense erotic practices function not merely as psychopathological symptoms but as existential strategies that disrupt normative consciousness and enable novel forms of self-other relations. Through...
Psychopathology
2025
Matteo Ballabio, Giovanni Stanghellini
In recent times, adolescents with severe forms of psychopathology that do not unambiguously fit into a precise diagnostic category have come to clinical observation. The diagnoses attributed to these young patients range from borderline personality disorder, to affective disorders, ADHD, and others. These diagnoses are mainly based on behavioural abnormalities (e.g., social withdrawal,...
Early Intervention in Psychiatry
November 1, 2024
Massimo Ballerini, Eleonora Rossi, Emanuele Cassioli et al.
4 citations
Psychotic-like anomalous self-experiences (ASEs) are core and early features of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, which have been recently also postulated to underlie embodiment disturbance in feeding and eating disorders (FEDs). The present study was aimed at investigating the interplay between ASEs and specific psychopathology in FED. Ninety persons with Anorexia Nervosa and 41 with Bulimia...
Psychopathology
2024
Milena Mancini, Cecilia Maria Esposito, Andrés Estradé et al.
6 citations
Abnormal self-experiences are a common feature of major depression despite their absence from current diagnostic manuals. Current diagnostic criteria leave us with an impoverished conception of depressive disorders, and they fail to exploit the diverse experiential alterations that might be useful for understanding and diagnosing patients, and last but not least for explaining the aetiology of...
Drug Science Policy and Law
2023
Antonio Metastasio, Silvio Mignogna, Riccardo Paci et al.
Since its discovery in 1943, LSD has been used by artists, scientists, and intellectuals, amongst others, to stimulate their creative insights. Federico Fellini, one of the most important film directors in the XX century, used LSD when it was still legal under the guidance of his psychoanalyst during a phase of personal and creative crisis. This article proposes a phenomenological analysis of...
World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA)
June 1, 2022
Paolo Fusar‐poli, Andrés Estradé, Giovanni Stanghellini et al.
225 citations
Psychosis is the most ineffable experience of mental disorder. We provide here the first co-written bottom-up review of the lived experience of psychosis, whereby experts by experience primarily selected the subjective themes, that were subsequently enriched by phenomenologically-informed perspectives. First-person accounts within and outside the medical field were screened and discussed in...
Psychopathology
2017
Luís Madeira, Sergio Carmenates, Cristina Costa et al.
31 citations
Anomalous self-experiences (ASEs), presumably involving alterations in "core" or "minimal self," have been studied as manifest in schizophrenia and its spectrum, in contrast with mood disorder and personality disorder samples. This is the first study to examine ASEs in panic disorder (PD), beginning the exploration of these disturbances of subjectivity in anxiety disorders. We aimed to clarify...
Psychopathology
December 15, 2016
Giovanni Stanghellini, Massimo Ballerini, Simona Presenza et al.
115 citations
BACKGROUND: Phenomenological psychopathology, through theoretical and idiographic studies, conceptualizes major depressive disorder (MDD) as a disorder of time experience. Investigations on abnormal time experience (ATE) in MDD adopting methodologies requested by the standards of empirical sciences are still lacking. Our study aimed to provide a qualitative analysis, on an empirical ground and...