My Way to Lost in Dialogue and Beyond

This essay outlines my path to Lost in Dialogue, a book in which I tried to consistently answer three questions: what is a human being, what is a psychopathological symptom, and what is a care. My purpose in writing this essay was to ground the practice of the clinic of mental pathology on a solid anthropological basis with a phenomenological matrix. In Anthropology of Vulnerability the continually attained, de-centered nature of human beings is described in terms of eccentricity and its consequence for mental pathology and human freedom. In Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies, drawing on Aristotle, I explored the fleshiness of human existence and the importance of common sense for experiencing oneself as a cohesive, unitary, embodied self that is separated from its environment yet connected and affectively attuned to it. Thereby I concentrated on the de-realization, de- personalization, and de-socialization that schizophrenic persons undergo that throws them into crisis regarding self-other inter-corporeal attunement and resonance. In Lost in Dialogue, I elaborate psychotherapeutic methods of treatment of mental conditions involving dialoguing with otherness within and without oneself.