CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1505028
This article is part of the Research TopicPhenomenological Psychopathology: Who, What and How? An analysis of key figures, advancements and challengesView all 16 articles
Can Psychiatry impede intersubjectivity? A phenomenological critique of the biomedical conceptualisation of anomalous experience
Provisionally accepted
- 1The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
- 2Department of Philosophy, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England, United Kingdom
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This paper is concerned with the phenomenon of anomalous experience. 'Anomalous experience' refers to experiences often described as hallucination, and more broadly; the experiential aspects of what is described as psychosis. I present a critical analysis of the dominant clinical conceptualisation of anomalous experience, which associates it with a 'pathology of the mind', by focusing on how this assumption is felt intersubjectively. I present Ratcliffe's (2017) conception of how intersubjectivity is implicated in anomalous experience, and analyse the psychiatric conceptualisation of anomalous experience by suggesting that it may impede intersubjective processes for people who have anomalous experiences. I suggest that this pathological marker, through its assumptions and institutional practices associated with it, may constitute kinds of relationality of a certain affective flavour, that exclude a person from shared interpersonal processes that structure experience in reference to shared reality. Thus, it is possible that the psychiatric conceptualisation of anomalous experience may play a role in the constitution of experiences of the kind that it seeks to erase. This implicates phenomenological psychopathology to question the starting assumptions that it takes as a given, direct picture of reality. Phenomenological psychopathology often takes a pathological conceptualisation of anomalous experience as its starting assumption, taking psychiatric concepts as given. I suggest that the discipline consider its own role, phenomenologically, in the multidirectional interactions that take place between anomalous experience and how it is conceptualised and responded to. I propose that starting with the direct experience rather than its pathological association (and all the affective baggage this comes with) would be a progressive direction for the future of phenomenological psychopathology. This points to critical phenomenology, and a critical phenomenological psychopathology.
Keywords: Phenomenology, Phenomenological psychopathology, Critical phenomenology, Epistemic injustice, Anomalous experience, intersubjectivity, intentionality, critical medical humanities
Received: 01 Oct 2024; Accepted: 09 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wantoch. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sabina Wantoch, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
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