Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Edidin, Aron

Area of Concentration

Philosophy with Psychology

Abstract

This thesis takes as its primary concern the conceptualization of mental abnormality and its impacts on self-understanding. While modern views favor the medical model, this investigation questions the utility, claims to truth, and ethical implications of such a view for the understanding of human suffering in a therapeutic context. By examining the history of the concept of madness, and philosophical work that has been done in relation to that concept, the author highlights the contextualized nature of any definition of abnormality. Therapeutic practice requires engagement with questions of self and the nature of being; the author explicates the views of Freud, Maslow, and Rogers in an effort to show the relationship between a thinker’s conception of abnormality and their ideas about human nature. Finally, the author offers as a possible solution to the concerns raised in this investigation the practice of Existential Psychotherapy, which emphasizes the philosophical method as an approach to subjects. Specifically, this practice uses phenomenological data as a way to understand subjects, believing that our securest source of information about the nature of selfhood and the mental world comes from subjects themselves describing their experience. In order to understand the subject, one must engage in a bracketing of beliefs about the self and human nature and engage with the client through a being-with. Philosophical considerations and particularly the ontology of Martin Heidegger ground this practice. The author suggests that the heterotopic qualities of the therapeutic space, along with the deep engagement in questions of Being of the therapist, provide suffering selves a chance to re-write their world-designs and articulate themselves in a place they can be fully received and that this kind of practice meets the proper ethical, truth, and utility requirements.

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