Course in Clinical Phenomenology. From theory to practice – 4th edition

Course in Clinical Phenomenology.
From theory to practice – 4th edition

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As mental health care becomes ever more biologically grounded, phenomenology offers a corrective lens. It is a disciplined way of attending to what psychological distress is actually like from the lived experience — the altered atmosphere of a delusional mood, the stalled time of melancholia, the thinned self of depersonalisation — before that experience is sorted into a diagnostic category.

The 4th edition of the PhenoLab course in Clinical offers mental health professionals, nurses, social workers and academics working at the intersectional fields of mental health a set of tools for encountering patients as people living through something, rather than as cases matching a category.

TEACHING METHODOLOGY

Each two-hour session combines lecture, case presentations, and discussion. Participants will engage with original texts, contemporary clinical applications, and have opportunities to practice phenomenological approaches through case discussions.

• Synchronous lectures
• Recordings will be made available only to enrolled participants

The course is designed for:

• psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists
• psychiatric nurses and social workers
• researchers in mental health
• postgraduate students in psychology, and philosophy
• philosophical counsellors and consultants
• anyone who wants to enrich their practice with phenomenological insight

COURSE STRUCTURE

This 21 session journey progresses from philosophical foundations to practical clinical applications. Beginning with core phenomenological concepts, we’ll explore how this approach transforms our understanding of major mental health conditions and clinical practice.

Each thematic session lasts 2 hours and takes up one author or phenomenon and follows it through:

• conceptual groundwork in the phenomenological tradition
• description of the phenomenon itself
• what it looks like in clinical practice
• discussion

COURSE CONTENT

BLOCK I: FOUNDATIONS (SESSIONS 1–7)

• Session 1, Phenomenology for beginners: the basics
• Session 2, Mind, brain and consciousness
• Session 3, Edmund Husserl: from descriptive psychology to the transcendental turn
• Session 4, Martin Heidegger and the hermeneutical shift
• Session 5, Karl Jaspers: descriptive phenomenology and the role of psychiatry
• Session 6, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: perception, the lived body and being-for-others
• Session 7, Critical phenomenology

BLOCK II: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEPRESSION (SESSIONS 8–12)

• Session 8, Varieties of depressive experience I: the loss of possibility
• Session 9, Varieties of depressive experience II: melancholia, guilt and the closed future
• Session 10, Temporality in depressive experience I: Binswanger and Minkowski
• Session 11, Temporality in depressive experience II: Straus, Jaspers, Tellenbach
• Session 12, Lived body, corporeality and intercorporeality in depression

BLOCK III: PSYCHOSIS AND SELF-DISTURBANCE (SESSIONS 13–15)

• Session 13, Kraepelin, Bleuler and contemporary classification
• Session 14, First-generation phenomenological approaches
• Session 15, Contemporary approaches: ipseity, self-disorder and their critics
• Session 16, Hallucinations, delusions and the quest for meaning

BLOCK IV: BEYOND THE PARADIGMS (SESSIONS 17–20)

• Session 17, Anxiety, panic and trauma
• Session 18, Eating disorders and the body seen from outside
• Session 19, Phenomenological interviews
• Session 20, From clinical semiology to the existential encounter
• Session 21, Recognition, relationality and empathy in practices of care

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