Sentimentos existenciais e desordem psiquiátrica: contribuições fenomenológicas

Abstract

Numerous approaches in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive sciences emphasize the role of affectivity as constituting a basic layer of our mental life. More recently, contemporary phenomenology has emphasized the experiential dimension of emotions and feelings, drawing attention to their relation to taxonomic and ontological issues. This work aims to contribute to this debate by presenting and discussing Matthew Ratcliffe’s concept of existential feelings. The concept refers to an affectivestructural dimension that is difficult to capture conceptually. Its use also allows us to accurately describe elements of disturbance in our familiar relationship with the world identified in some psychiatric disorders. The ways in which the common and everyday experience can be interrupted concern a very subtle balance in the inseparable relationship between self and world, whose mediation happens fundamentally through these feelings. In theoretical terms, examining these feelings also implies a critical assessment of the reductionist and anti-ecological philosophical perspectives on cognition, which culminate in a narrow conception of its disorders, understood as mere biological or psychological processes confined to the brain. Taking this critical perspective as the starting point, this work lies in the intersection between the philosophy of emotion and psychiatry from a phenomenological perspective. It contributes to the assessment and development of the concept of existential feelings. I defend this proposal throughout the five articles that make up the thesis, plus a discussion section. The first article evaluates the relationship between the notion of existential feelings and the concept of Stimmung in the Heideggerian tradition, taking into account the distinction between these concepts from their methodological function; the second article maintains that the notion of existential feelings plays a central role in the determination and individuation of the entity that exhibits the possibility of experiencing what I call disordered existence; the third article presents and discusses in detail the formulation and development of the notion of existential feelings. I also evaluate how to adequately access these feelings through the emergence of psychiatric disorders, and exemplify the experiential disruption such disorders promote through the existential feeling of doubt; the fourth article presents a specific contribution to the theory of existential feelings by approaching the dimension of body memory as an intrinsic and constitutive element of this phenomenological category; the fifth article discusses ways in which experiences of depression can be understood from the notion of "pararealism", in terms of structural modifications in the sense of reality of these individuals. The general aim of this thesis consists of a presentation and discussion of the notion of existential feelings in contemporary phenomenology while defending its usefulness for the discussion of access to and description of psychiatric disorders.