Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis and phenomenological psychopathology mark the beginning of twentieth-century psychiatry. They are two grand experiments against nineteenth-century neurological-criminological alienistics. Psychopathological experiences are not meaningless disfunctions, they both state. But psychoanalysis and phenomenology immediately part ways. Freud’s psychoanalysis reconstructs psychiatry around the idea of the unconscious, phenomenological psychiatry around the idea of consciousness. Psychoanalysis believes in causes, and the first unconscious cause is what Freud called drive, with its adventures and misadventures. Husserl’s phenomenology believes in the transcendental, and what we call psychopathological experiences are nothing other than the fading, the displacement, the fragmentations of the constitutive power of the transcendental.