The Relevance of Phenomenology

Keywords
phenomenology, introspective psychology, Merleau-Ponty, melancholia

Martin wyllie's paper raises very impor-tant issues about the relevance of phe-nomenology to psychiatry, but the language in which he presents phenomenology unfortunately makes it sound (contrary to his own intentions) too much like empirical introspective psychology. The aim of this commentary is to improve the presentation of phenomenology, drawing particularly on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to develop Wylie's position and to bring out better the relevance of this approach to our understanding of mental disorder in general and of melancholia/depression in particular.

I am essentially in sympathy with Martin Wyllie's account of the phenomenology of what he prefers to call melancholia (and indeed have discussed it with him on numerous occasions). His present paper, as well as containing many valuable insights on that topic, also raises important questions about the relevance of phenomenology to the theory and practice of psychiatry, and it is on those questions that I aim to concentrate in this commentary, in the hope of developing further what Martin has begun. To do this, it is necessary first of all to set out a more thorough account of what is meant, in this context, by phenomenology.

Phenomenology is often presented as if it were a kind of empirical introspective psychology, and Martin's choice of language unfortunately sometimes (certainly not always) gives the impression that he shares that understanding of the term. For instance, he says that a phenomenological description of "lived time" tells us " 'what it is like' to experience 'lived time'" (2005, 173); and in other places uses causal terms about the relation between different aspects of lived experience, for example, that are more appropriate to an empirical, scientific, study. This is certainly one accepted use of phenomenology, but it is not what was meant by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the two philosophers whom he clearly has most in mind in his paper; and, more important perhaps, it is not the sort of phenomenology likely to shed the most light on the psychiatry of melancholia.

In my commentary, therefore, I try to set out as clearly and briefly as I can an alternative and more appropriate account of relevant aspects of phenomenology, in the form with which I am most familiar, that which it takes in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology was, just as Husserl, its founder, had described it, "the study of essences" (Merleau-Ponty 2002, vii). That is, it was not an empirical study of the contingent contents of any individual's experience, but an investigation of the universal structures of human experience as such. But at the same time (and here we see a distinctive approach of Merleau-Ponty's own, derived from his reading of Heidegger and the later Husserl), "phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence" (2002, vii). Human experience is not, for him, that of a "transcendental subject", standing outside the world and simply observing it: human being is, in the phrase he derived from Heidegger, "being-in-the-world". That is, we exist within the world, actively engaging with it, and our experience of it directly "opens on to" the world which we experience.

The world is thus "objective" in the sense that it is always already there—we do not create it, we inhabit it, and the world we inhabit necessarily extends beyond our experience of it. But the world we inhabit necessarily has a "subjective" meaning for us, just because we inhabit it and actively engage with it. To take a simple example, we necessarily see some items in the world as food because we experience hunger. These subjective meanings are just as much part of the world as we experience it as the measurable properties of objects in which science is interested. They give sense to the idea that the world is our world, that "subjective" and "objective" are not polar opposites, but are necessarily entangled in our...