«One can see the phenomenological proposal as occupying a middle position between two opposing views. According to the first view, the self is some kind of unchanging soul substance that is distinct from and ontologically independent of the worldly objects and conscious episodes it is directed at and the subject of. According to the second view, there is nothing to consciousness apart from a manifold or bundle of changing experiences. There are experiences and perceptions, but no experiencer or perceiver. A third option is available, however, the moment one realizes that an understanding of what it means to be a self calls for an examination of the structure of experience, and vice versa. Thus, the experiential self is not a separately existing entity, it is not something that exists independently of, in separation from or in opposition to the stream of consciousness, but neither is it simply reducible to a specific experience or (sub-)set of experiences; nor is it for that matter a mere social construct that evolves through time. Rather, and to repeat, the (minimal or experiential) self can be identified with the ubiquitous first-person character of the experiential phenomena (Zahavi 2014). The experiential self is consequently, and very importantly, not some experiential object. It is not as if there is a self-object in addition to all the other objects in one’s experiential field. Rather the claim is that all of these objects, when experienced, are given in a distinctly first-person way. In short, if we want to “locate” the experiential self, we shouldn’t look at what is being experienced, but at how it is being experienced.»

— Dan Zahavi. Self
(in G. Stanghellini et al. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology)

подарили, хвастаюсь

«Over the course of human history, there have been two revolutions in what we think meaning is. One, the “modernist revolution” started four hundred years ago and came to its conclusion a bit more than a hundred years ago. The second, which I’ll call the “constructivist revolution” is just beginning, or maybe is just in our future. […]

Adults today must understand the modernist revolution if they hope to make sense of their lives and deal with the conflicts that adults today face. Adults today must understand the constructivist revolution to get a grip on the most complex conflicts in the world today. »

— Nadia Rodinskaya. Intellectual History in Brief

«Psychotherapy, in all its various forms, has been determined by the way in which psychology has thematized human life. Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, psychology has conceived man on the basis of the suggestions provided by the natural sciences, using the conceptual tools and categories favored by them. The definition of the psyche as a natural entity, a thing among other things, is what has determined the limits and horizons of the field of inquiry, as well as of all praxis and research; it has fixed the boundaries of the subject matter and hence the way in which the fundamental structures related to it are to be investigated. […]

It is therefore possible to look at one’s psyche (or that of another person) as though it were an object […] Different schools of psychology are distinguished by different focuses of observation, more or less articulated within given heuristic models […] Ultimately, however, they all share the same ontological foundation and the same method of inquiry.

[…]

From being a science of the spirit, psychology therefore becomes a science of psychic phenomena to be investigated in the light of the knowledge which distinguishes the natural sciences. Natural-scientific psychology thus irrupts with its methodology into the sphere of awareness: while searching for invariants, it devitalizes lived experience and dehistoricizes factical experience.»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«Socrates makes an explicit suggestion to him [Alcibiades]. Most men, he explains, believe that taking care of oneself means taking care of one’s business; but the art by which we take care of ourselves is not the same as that by which we take care of what belongs to us. In order to know what art (techne) makes us better, we must first know ourselves, which is to say, our soul. This notion is reflected by the famous saying gnothi seauton, the injunction which the Delphic oracle would always address to those who consulted her.

If the soul must know itself, what must it turn toward in order to see at the same time itself and what it really is? To answer this question, the well-known metaphor of reflexiveness is introduced. Just as an eye gazing at itself in the pupil of another eye facing it can see, in addition to this pupil and reflected within it, the part in which its own visual capacity (arete) lies, so the soul, in order to know itself, must reflect itself in the brightest part of another soul, the part where the virtue of the soul lies: its sophia. […] This means that the act of reflexion, by which the soul can simultaneously know itself and what it is, only takes place provided one’s gaze is turned toward another soul engaged in the same quest. […] the movement by which the soul knows itself, while at the same time gaining access to the being of things— what endures in an unbroken present—is necessarily associated with a constant questioning, jointly conducted with others engaged in the same quest. The care of self, therefore, entails the establishment of a relationship with another person. In Greek Antiquity, this person was one’s philosophical master; in early Christianity, one’s spiritual father. Then, in the modern age, the idea emerged that access to the truth could be ensured by acts of conscience alone (Foucault 2001).»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«Socrates’ advice to Alcibiades, who seeks to administer the city and therefore claim responsibility for the public good, is that, in order to correctly and honestly engage in politics, he must first of all be capable of seeing things for what they really are, rather than what they appear to be. “And you will act with your eyes turned on the divine light,” Socrates states (134d). By following the divine light, the soul finds stable guidance in its relations with things, people, and the ever-changing affairs of the world. Only by looking to what is bright and divine can the person wishing to take care of the common good act according to justice and wisdom. Besides, self-knowledge corresponds to a way of living that acknowledges the value of truth above all, and entails a constant attempt to cultivate one’s relationship with it, and therefore a constant testing of our capacity to gain access to things in them- selves. The difference between men emerges and takes shape starting from a different care of the soul. The practice of self-knowledge as the contemplation of the being of things, theorein, is thus connected to the knowledge of the care of self and hence to a tendency to question one’s own opinions, to the suspension of judgment, and to the ongoing quest to uncover the meaning of the famous Socratic notion of “knowing that you know nothing.»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«as Hadot notes—while conceiving wisdom in different terms, Hellenistic schools all share the (ancient) view of philosophy as the pursuit of perfect tranquility. Hence, philosophy is envisaged as a “remedy for human worries, anguish, and misery brought about for the Cynics, by social constraints and conventions; for the Epicureans, by the quest for false pleasures; for the Stoics, by the pursuit of pleasure and egoistic self-interest; and for the skeptics, by false opinions”»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«It is death, therefore, which reveals life through its no longer being there, through its being complete. Existence means presence: an incomplete presence which remains unchanged with respect to all possible transformations and which reaches completion with its end.

Setting the theme in relation to a much broader historical perspective—which first emerged in the context of the Orphic religion and was then incorporated within Christian and Gnostic conceptions—Jonas (1967) brilliantly shows that one of the defining features of the modern age is submission “to the ontological dominance of death.” Modern thought strives to reveal the laws of inert matter governing life as though the living organism were nothing but “a ludibrium materiae, a subtle hoax of matter” (p. 12). Thus death, which determines the perfection of existence, at the same time, annihilates it.»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy