Psychiatry’s approach to religiously framed psychotic experiences reflects unresolved philosophical tensions inherited from Kant’s distinction between nature and freedom. Reductionism collapses meaning into mechanism, perpetuating epistemic injustice; dual-validity recognizes both neurobiological and spiritual interpretations but lacks implementation frameworks. This article traces the impasse...
Hospitality is a key concept in contemporary continental philosophy that emphasizes the importance of welcoming the stranger. Despite its relevance to psychotherapy, little has been written about how it could be a framework for the psychotherapeutic encounter, especially for people experiencing psychosis. In the world of psychiatry, the person with psychosis is often viewed as “other,” a...
The concept of recognition has recently been introduced into the philosophy of psychiatry, particularly through Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, to discuss the demand for recognition by mental health activists. This paper complements this perspective with a first-person approach, that is, a phenomenological perspective on recognition using the example of psychosocial interventions for psychosis. For...
The thesis of this essay is that the desire to categorize psychiatric patients in a binary way—as either recognizing that their bizarre experiences are subjective and unreal or wrongly believing them to be objective and real—has resulted in misleading ways of talking about depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDR). This has, in turn, obscured how the disorder presents in severe and...
This paper examines delusions and psychedelic experiences as sources of both epistemic risk and benefit. Although these states are often seen as irrational or pathological, the paper explores their potential epistemic and psychological benefits, such as fostering emotional adaptation and creativity. The paper cautions against interpreting subjective experiences as metaphysical truths, which...
abstract: Paul's concepts of "Transformative Experiences" (TE) has sparked extensive discussion on multiple epistemological and ethical issues within philosophy. In particular, Paul's work has inspired significant work on the possibility of informed consent with regard to medical interventions that may induce said TEs. One such intervention, namely Psychedelic-assisted Therapy (PAT), has been...
Paul’s concepts of “Transformative Experiences” (TE) has sparked extensive discussion on multiple epistemological and ethical issues within philosophy. In particular, Paul’s work has inspired significant work on the possibility of informed consent with regard to medical interventions that may induce said TEs. One such intervention, namely Psychedelic-assisted Therapy (PAT), has been discussed...
This paper examines recent empirical research on the psychedelic experience and makes sense of the current literature in terms of ontic structural realism, a position in the metaphysics of science which holds that relations are fundamental. This interpretation is maintained by first providing a philosophical framework for the varieties of self-transcendent experiences by implementing a notion...
Abstract: Over the last years, 4E Cognition approaches have emerged in an attempt to overcome the limitations of neuro-reductionism about mental disorders, that is, the view that mental disorders can be fully explained as brain disorders. Instead, 4E approaches emphasize in varying degrees the situated, embodied, embedded, and enactive features of psychopathological conditions. Despite its...
Abstract: Psychiatric literature about when instances of voice hearing should be regarded as religiously inflected psychopathology and when they should be regarded as religious experiences sometimes presupposes that a person’s experience can only be either psychopathological, or else a genuine religious experience. In this paper I will consider an alternative: the possibility of a both–and...
Abstract:Philosophical speculation about how psychiatric externalism might function in practice has yet to fully consider the multitude of externalist psychiatric systems that exist beyond the bounds of modern psychiatry. Believing that anthropology can inform philosophical debate on the matter, the paper illustrates one such case. The discussion is based on 19 months of first-hand ethnographic...
Debates on the distinction between religious experience and mental disorder tend to assume, rather than argue for, the existence of unique types of experience: the religious and the psychopathological. This paper interrogates this approach to the problem. It deconstructs the distinction by examining what the distinction is about beyond the terms in which it is presented and whether it matters...
Abstract:The authors argue that Morenian-inspired existential psychodrama turns out to be a formidable lever for opening up existence as it allows schizophrenic patients to incorporate the experience of an “absolutely other” on which the foundation of any autonomous self is built. More precisely, by relying on their clinical experiences, the authors show how psycho-dramatic play goes along with...
Over the past decade and a half, psychedelic drug-induced experiences have been returning to psychiatry as promising new healing modalities. The case of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can inform how we think about the context of drug use because psychedelics are commonly considered to be sensitive to the ‘[mind]set and setting’ of their use. As such, epistemic and therapeutic concerns...
Culture, Context, and Community in Contemporary Psychedelic Research Brian D. Earp (bio) and David B. Yaden (bio) Psychedelics require cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study, and we were happy to see a contribution from the field of medical anthropology. Such a study holds the promise of characterizing the ways in which psychedelics are situated in contemporary societies, both within and...
I'm grateful to the authors for their comments, and for the opportunity to respond. To clarify my approach, I sought to discuss the centrality of 'set and setting' at descriptive and normative levels in the Psychedelic Renaissance by focusing on the language of containment prevalent during my ethnographic research. Inspired by the study of material culture, I took up certain questions that can...
A Measure of Philosophical Distance Bhrigupati Singh (bio) How is conceptual foreignness received within an existing territory? I am grateful to my respondents for receiving my invocation of foreignness from phenomenological psychopathology not as a question of culture or nationality but rather, in terms of philosophical distance. As I ask in the article: how do we measure philosophical...
Some Aspects of Containment Matter Ben Lewis (bio) Tehseen noorani’s article “Containment Matters: Set and Setting in Contemporary Psychedelic Psychiatry” presents a comprehensive, deeply researched ethnographic perspective on current research practices in psychedelic-assisted therapy. This is rapidly evolving terrain scientifically, clinically, legally, and socially. Noorani’s on-the-ground...
The past twenty years have seen an increase in the importance of the body in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. This 'embodied' trend challenges the orthodox view in cognitive science in several ways: it downplays the traditional 'mind-as-computer' approach and emphasizes the role of interactions between the brain, body, and environment. In this article, I review recent work in...
Searle and the “Deep Unconscious” Eric Gillett (bio) Abstract The philosopher, John Searle (1992, 1990), has challenged some of the most basic tenets of cognitive psychology, especially the notion of a “deep unconscious” defined as mental processes that are in principle inaccessible to consciousness. In previous papers I have argued for a broad concept of the unconscious which includes in...
Commentary on “Searle and the ‘Deep Unconscious’” Dan Lloyd (bio) Can another person know my thoughts with better authority than I know them myself? With his affirmative answer to this question, Freud invented the twentieth-century human, a being whose mind is accessible to scrutiny from outside, and whose attempts at conscious self-explanation are at best partial and in many cases wrong. Even...
Commentary on “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry” G. Lynn Stephens (bio) A necessary condition of our having free will is that we initiate some of our actions by our own will or decision. Spence argues that, in light of certain empirical findings, we can accept that willing causes action, only if we acknowledge that willing is a non-conscious phenomenon. “If the notion of free will is...