Handbooks are rarely this cohesive and so densely packed with rich and distinctive knowledge. Unlike some other collections, this work has only the essential authors and the essential topics that provide the reader with proficiency on the phenomenological approach to psychopathology.  

For many decades now, phenomenologists have kept the essence of psychiatry alive: they look inside the psyche itself, not just inside the brain. Their methods aim to understand pathology and its implications: how does the patient feel? What is she thinking? What does she mean with that utterance? How can she be comforted, or helped? These questions and the answers provided in this book aim for a quality practice in the fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry, that can ultimately help patients, nurses, staff, and doctors alike.  Prevention and understanding of psychiatric disorders is known to be a multifactor task, in which phenomenology plays a crucial part, especially in cases considered risky and hard to comprehend. The content in this handbook features valuable specialized knowledge that illustrates how a patient behaves under diverse psychopathologies, and, consequently, what are the signals to look for to achieve early prevention and diagnosis. 

Clarity is one of the key features of this book. Those of us who have worked with phenomenological views before, know that the original sources, such as Heidegger’s works, require an enormous amount of interpretation, and so they are regarded as somewhat confusing by the scholar community. However, in this handbook, every paragraph is written with the transparency and conciseness that only experience can provide. In order to facilitate its use, each chapter is self-standing, although the overall structure is designed to build a complete picture of both the historical and the contemporary views of phenomenology and psychopathology. The richness revealed inside the chapters is remarkable: it’s abundance of clinical cases, contemporary theories, historical basis, references, experiments, philosophical discussion and explanatory power makes this book stand out from other options. In particular, the whole section on delusions is written by many of the best available authors. This section could be a book in itself, and I consider that it is one of the best assets of this handbook. It must be noted, though, that literature about psychoanalysis is not prominent in this oeuvre, although there are other handbooks that address this topic.  

The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology has two main audiences: the first one would be the experts who could benefit from a first approach to phenomenology, such as practitioners, teachers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. For them, I would recommend reading the first three sections before anything else, consisting in 46 solid chapters where the basic concepts of historical phenomenology are thoroughly explained. 

The second public would consist of a more specialized audience, such as philosophers, clinical psychiatrists and psychotherapists that seek a deeper understanding of what their patients go through, and that already know the basic concepts put forward by Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and other phenomenologists. A fair amount of applied analysis and clinical cases can be found along the 46 latter chapters, including eating disorders, PTSD, schizophrenia, gender dysphoria and delusions, among others.

Although I rarely note these things, this time the editorial work is remarkable, for even if there are more than fifty authors participating in this book, the writing style and the sort of information it contains are polished to the point that one can easily jump from one chapter to another without having to readapt to a different writing style. This makes a smooth reading experience that I didn’t really expect, but that I appreciated a lot, nonetheless.

Finally, I would like to emphasize again that this book was written by the people that stand out in their field for their experience, expertise, and scientific drive, making phenomenology an approach that can help people suffering from a range of psychiatric conditions. I would dare to say that it’s not really an expensive book: what you get to pay is perhaps just equivalent to two or three regular books on this subject. And given that each chapter has a good length and it’s densely packed, I think it is one of those books you ought to have in your personal library. 

 Dr. Aline Maya, associate teacher at the University Centre of Eastern Mexico.

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: philosophy, phenomenology, psychiatry