From the Patient’s Perspective: Engaging With the Other

ONE CENTURY AFTER the first conference gathering first-generation clinical phenomenologists in Zurich in 1922, today's psychiatry is far from exploring phenomena from the patient's perspective—that is, "letting-be" the Other, and "giving or compromising"—that is, engaging with the Other (Doerr-Zegers, 2022). The motto of phenomenology has been since its beginning "To things themselves!". Edmund Husserl—the founder of phenomenology in the field of philosophy—exhorted to go back to the things themselves, that is, to render self-evident in fully fledged intuitions that what is usually given in preformed abstractions like "concepts," "judgments," "truths," and so on (Husserl, 1970). Clinical phenomenology has taken up Husserl's motto and added another: "To understand is to cure." Put together, the result is: "To cure is to understand the things themselves." But what does exactly mean "To the things themselves"? And what does it mean "to understand"? What is the use of understanding in the clinical setting? And, ultimately, what does the "cure" consist of?