Research Seminars, Colloquia and Reading Groups
Thursday, June 04, 2020
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Knowledge and Understanding SeminarBy ZoomSpeaker: Richard Gipps (Oxford) Title: 'On the Importance of Not Understanding the Patient' 础产蝉迟谤补肠迟鈥�: "One kind of everyday understanding that we seek has to do with making sense of what someone鈥檚 getting at or on about with her initially opaque words or actions. The retrieval of such meaning is a mainstay of everyday life and an ambition that psychology often brings with it to the clinical setting – even when the thought there under consideration is psychotic. It鈥檚 also presupposed by such efforts at understanding, causally, why the patient thinks as she does as invoke the notion of a mistake or illusion: we can鈥檛 understand why someone makes a particular mistake unless we already understand something of its content. (The understanding here is captured by suggestions like: 鈥榃ere I in her cognitive/perceptual/somatosensory/existential/environmental predicament, I鈥檇 come to that conclusion too鈥�).
In this paper I suggest that certain theories of thought disorder, passivity experience and delusion – theories which hope to understand the patient by retrieving his speaker鈥檚 meaning – radically fail. They do so because they trade on an alienated conception of ordinary mental life which is itself only sustained by illusions of sense; they attempt to reduce delusion to illusion; and they fail the patient by evading the fact of, rather than meeting him in the midst of, his brokenness. Despite the impossibility of retrieving speaker鈥檚 meaning from truly psychotic discourse, this does not render unavailable other forms of understanding (symbolic/motivational, neurological, situational etc.) of the psychotic subject. Even so, if we鈥檙e to achieve, with the psychotic subject, that (moral) form of understanding which can be said to be shown someone, we must first learn to avoid the temptation of attributing speaker鈥檚 or agent鈥檚 meaning to his psychotic words and acts. To this end this paper outlines what I鈥檒l call an 鈥榓pophatic鈥� (as opposed to a 鈥榗ataphatic鈥�) psychopathology. This 鈥榓pophatic鈥� approach aims at understanding the patient not through positively understanding her words鈥� meaning but instead through understanding just why some of the things we鈥檙e most tempted to say of her fail her.&辩耻辞迟;鈥� |