Psychopathology in the light of emergent trends in the philosophy of consciousness, neuropsychiatry and phenomenology

Abstract

A controversy rages in philosophical approaches to mind that goes to the core of the mind/body problem in psychiatry:how is it possible that a physical system, no matter complex, can give rise to the subjective experience of consciousness? Taking this irreducibility of consciousness into account, philosophical approaches to cognitive neuroscience and psychopathology, as well as the rapid evolving cognitive neurophychiatry, have been forcing new resolutions to the mind/body problem and other traditional dualisms which plague the older psychiatric explanatory models. Attempts to operationalize subjectivity in psychiatric research, however, are more concordant with the present trend to unburden clinical decision making by algorithmic formulas (as dictated by the pressures of managed care and operationalized research) than engaging and developing the skills of the clinician in terms of his or her total potential. Such dilemmas require a renewed reading of classical psychiatrists who have attempted to take account of the subjective experience of consciousness in their seminal psychopathologies.