Personal Stories and Psychotherapy
6.8 The Therapeutic Approach to the Other’s Relation with the Ongoing Situation: The Care of Self
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compared to Husserlian phenomenology. According to Husserl, the meaningfulness of a given object is given together with its sensory perception (as a sort of excess).
Hence, being must be given and must be given as the object of an intentional con- sciousness. This phenomenology thus takes the shape of a science of acts of con- sciousness, which evidently is not concerned with the question of what makes it possible to grasp the being of a thing as an intelligible meaning—i.e., of how that giveness (being) of the thing is itself given.
This problem of conflating phenomenological intuition with the intuition of objects is all the more acutely felt in Husserl’s phenomenology because the fact of turning toward the essence (genus, species, individual) makes phenomenological intuition coincide “with the grasping of relations of order” (GA 58 1992, p. 240), which amounts to the intuition of an object.
The distinction between reflective phenomenology and hermeneutical phenom- enology, therefore, does not concern—and hence does not rest upon—the method- ological use of reflection, as Zahavi argues; rather, it implies a particular way of grasping living experience, which cannot be understood if it is grasped according to the theoretical mode of accessing things.15
Clearly, if ipseity is envisaged as something other than a thing, then the sense of being this ipseity cannot be an object of knowledge. The defining feature of the rela- tion with oneself which distinguishes ipseity is the fact that ipseity can only relate to itself by enacting existential possibilities. Hence, it would be more appropriate to speak not of reflection but of refraction—a refraction which is constantly taking shape. As stressed by Patočka (1988) “the primary form of this relation is not an orientation toward the object, but the practical grasping of a given possibility … it is a reflection clearly guided by an idea of being which amounts entirely to its praxis” (p. 93—see too Patočka 1998 lecture 12).
6.8 The Therapeutic Approach to the Other’s Relation
On the one hand stands the determination of lived experience on the basis of preestablished principles and laws, on the other the practice of appropriating the past on the basis of factical life (and hence in the light of the possibilities of a unique life), by going along with the directions of its actualization and explicating its modes of being. These two different experiences of the relation with the past reveal two different movements with respect to factical experience. The first approach, the theoretical one, fails to access this experience, because it fixes it in general terms under the observer’s gaze, so that what it grasps is no longer the experience at all, but rather a reflected objectification of it.
The second approach operates within the actualization of the lived experience according to the intentions of living experience and without betraying its essence. It brings about the explication of the motility of this experience, retracing the motives and tendencies that it conceals and from which it draws its vitality, so to speak. One might say that in the former case, experience is construed as an object in general (and then increasingly specified until it becomes present in flesh and blood), while in the latter, it is construed as a phenomenon which can only be grasped if one keeps to the way in which it comes into shape, manifests itself, and hence occurs by co-re- enacting it.
What emerges here, in a more complex form, is the problem we encountered in relation to the famous example of the table mentioned by the young Heidegger in his Freiburg lectures. A table may be grasped through a theoretical access, as a per- ceptible thing that is more or less rectangular, brown, made of wood, etc.—which is to say, as an object of the observer’s direct perception which reveals itself to be a table under the categorial gaze. Alternatively, we can enter into the flow of the living experience of a postman, electrician, cleaner, or student, so as to produce an account of it that is in keeping with each person’s sense of enactment. In this case, although everyone sees the table—which has a particular meaning in the context of my stu- dio—it means something different for each person.
If knowledge, then, is an intentional behavior directed toward something—e.g., a table, seen from the point of view of the postman, electrician, cleaner, or student but also of the epistemologist, who sees it as a perceptual object, or of the geometri- cian or carpenter, who considers the quadrature or the type of wood—what motiva- tion orients us toward grasping the table as something which gives itself in different ways, according to these different perspectives? First of all, however, we grasp the table, i.e., however we experience something, the thing in question always gives itself as a phenomenon and not an object. The aim of formal indication is precisely to grasp this diversity of meaning in terms of intentional referencing.
This diversity (of the meaning of the table), the content, has to do with the enact- ment of the way in which each person relates to the table—of how each person grasps the table and how the table is encountered. Therefore, we can only grasp the range of different personal perspectives if we go with the flow of those different ways of experiencing the table and of engaging with the table in that particular con- text and situation (the sense of enactment). Going along with the enactment of liv- ing experience, then, means understanding and explicating what a unique experience preserves.
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It is evident that if we grasp the act of seeing the table (for each of the actors mentioned) according to the theoretical perspective—i.e., in terms of the perception of the table—this way of grasping it prevents us from understanding lived experi- ence as it unfolds, as it actually manifests itself to the person having it. Making prereflective experience something theoretical means tearing it away from life, from one’s personal story.
If, in keeping with its etymology, we understand the word “phenomenon” to mean that which shows itself (i.e., to each person), a phenomenon may be regarded precisely as the sense of enactment of a way of looking which cannot be reduced to perception, but which is rather embedded in the living understand- ing of the overall meaningfulness of what is encountered. Hence, it may be understood as the meaning which the table has in a given circumstance for the person gazing at it. One example would be looking at the table according to the meaningful trajectories traced by the electrician, and therefore as a way to reach the ceiling lamp, assessing the need to move it in order to work on the electrical system. In other words, the hermeneutic understanding of the way in which the electrician sees the table corresponds to an engagement with the enactment of that lived experience according to the sense proper to it. A lived experience can be encountered—so to speak—by the living experience of the interpreter, with- out any need for reflection, through an explicating understanding which does not shatter the original intentionality of life in order to present it objectively: for it leaves it intact. Therefore, the hermeneutic understanding of another person’s lived experience coincides with an engagement with the enactment of the other person’s lived experience according to the sense proper to that experience: a co- retrieval which implies a “sympathy,” a conformity to the flow of the other per- son’s lived experience, which evidently cannot be performed automatically.
Rather, it corresponds to a (formally indicated) way of comporting oneself toward something which only attains completion through the enactment of the original experience together with the patient. Therefore, what formal indication gives access to is not an object, but that context of motivations for knowledge (i.e., the reasons why I know the table in one way rather than another) which the meaningfulness of the object points to.
The therapist thus methodically retrieves the actual experience of the patient’s life in agreement with the three articulations that make up its full meaning—con- tent, reference, and enactment—and according to which experience takes shape, in order to repeat it while explicating its sense without destroying it. This behavior of the therapist with respect to the patient’s experience amounts to a way of approach- ing the relationship which the patient has with the situation under investigation—a relationship which is methodically retrieved as a sense of content, a sense of refer- ence, and a sense of enactment and which is co-enacted according to the direction of formal indication. This method enables the explication of the patient’s experi- ence insofar as it articulates, and hence unravels, that lack of distinction between the act of experiencing and what is experienced which characterizes concrete expe- rience: its verbum internum. This methodical retrieval therefore consists in an experience of the experience that is being studied; in other words, the therapist’s
6.8 The Therapeutic Approach to the Other’s Relation with the Ongoing Situation
enactment of the patient’s experience brings into focus the patient’s own articula- tion of the sense of the experience, so as to re-enact the latter and thus grasp its meaning.
The most relevant methodological aspect is that the patient’s experience is not accessed through reflection—whose procedures cannot be methodically recorded (Quesne 2004)—but is instead guided by a kind of research that poses questions (questioning), creates doubts, and is enacted by relating to a content: the concrete experience of the patient, envisioned as a formal indication. The notion of phenom- enon is therefore broadened as a principle and established as the foundation of the method. By paraphrasing what Theodore Kiesel writes with regard to the practice of philosophy, we might argue that the unthematic conditions structuring the decision to heal have to do with the situation of understanding and the fascination with ques- tioning produced by the passion for healing.16
The content of the experience disclosed through questioning is not an object which appears in the light of reflection, starting from an empty generality that is filled according to progressive degrees of knowledge until a final specification is attained, thereby making the unique experience under investigation dissolve within a category; rather, the experience is regarded as a formal indication, as an inten- tional reference to a context of motivations for knowledge. The patient’s experience, in other words, is not suddenly given to me, e.g., as a particular element of attach- ment (genus), whose type (species) I increasingly specify via analysis in order to bring the underlying motivation to light.
Differently from generalization, formal indication does not provide a horizon through which to determine the experience under investigation in advance, but indi- cates a context of tendencies and motivations for knowledge on the basis of which it is possible to gain access to the experience in all of its uniqueness. This means that the experience under scrutiny discloses an unprominent multiplicity of horizons of sense which attain determination through the experience itself; and it is precisely the disclosure of this context of tendencies and motivations that provides access to the experience as such, in its uniqueness. Heidegger can thus argue that motivation derives from the sense of reference of the interpretive attitude (understood as this unprominent and indeterminate multiplicity), that an object gives itself and is grasped in relation to such an attitude, and that the origin of the formal lies in the sense of reference (GA 60 1995, p. 94). On the other hand, the reference—the sense of reference—may be determined according to the content.
The content points to heterogeneous directions of sense which, while indicated, remain only implicit in the experience in question but which are then explicated and interpreted through the methodical retrieval of the sense of content of the situation, on the basis of an engagement in the re-enactment of the other’s experience accord- ing to the various directions disclosed by formal indication (and therefore according to different senses of reference). For example, as the table points to the condition of
16 “Having the situation of understanding and the passion for questioning” is for Kisiel (1993) the condition that structures the decision to philosophize (p. 234).
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the electrician who sees it (a condition which remains implicit), in order to grasp the meaning which the electrician assigns to the object, it is necessary to disclose the situation according to his lived experience and retrace this situation together with him. The development and articulation of these trajectories, which point to the retrieval of the original meaningful contexts, have the present renewal of ipseity as their criterion—a criterion on which the enactment and hence the whole question- based research may be tailored. In other words, the guiding criterion of the interpre- tation is the retrieval of sense on the part of ongoing ipseity, in view of a more intimate fullness. The search for sense and the related questioning of the meaning of past experience are conducted precisely on the basis of this retrieval accomplished through the renewal of ongoing ipseity.
It is precisely by going along with the enactment of the experiences pertaining to the sphere under investigation, and by ensuring the deconstructive/constructive development of this process according to the orientations provided by formal indi- cation, that the therapist can retrace the patient’s experiences until he reaches the sense of the underlying experience and hence its appropriation: the lived experience which is already mine becomes proper to me. As Quesne notes, while “destruction means approaching the origin, the sense of enactment means attaining the origin”
(p. 144).
Appropriation thus lends all the various situations an articulated unity of sense which corresponds to an increase in the fullness of sense. The formally indicated interpretation of what was meaningful reflects itself in actual life as the renewal of ipseity in the present: a renewal which enables one to open up existence to a new movement of understanding, restarting the interpretive circle. In this sense, phe- nomenological psychotherapy follows the ancient trail of the care of the self by focusing on the transformation of oneself through oneself.