A contribuição da análise fenomenológica nos estudos de relato de caso

Abstract

We argue that clinical psychiatry oscillates between two epistemological poles: inference and perception. The inferential approach categorizes illnesses bottom up, from visible symptoms to the pathological category supposedly causing them. In doing so, psychiatry moves away from a possible instantaneous perception of a patient, as well as from illness as a changing, evolving, phenomenon. From a phenomenological point of view, the perceptive approach enables the therapist, within an encounter, to experience the emergence of an impression of a patient’s overall bearing, or attitude. Thanks to épochè, a sense of form, Gestalt will emerge. The clinical case, nevertheless, is always a construction, an intersubjective narrative about illness, recounted by the patient. Creating a library of clinical cases leads to the development of case types, each becoming a reference to which future clinical cases can be compared and categorized as belonging to a clinical family; it is the participant with respect to Plato’s eidos. Phenomenology contributes to clinical experience in that it enables the link between perception and inference, between subjective experience and intersubjective narrative, and between person and case type.