A. Tatossian: The Phenomenology of Psychoses (1979)

The main thrust of phenomenological psychiatry is the teaching of a new way of approaching experience. This will be developed in later parts of this treatise. Here we are concerned with the history of the movement, which itself brings out this theme quite adequately. It is not possible to go into the entire complexity of the history, but we can trace two important strands, both of which emanated from that historic day, the 25th November 1922, which we can say marked the debut of phenomenological psychiatry. The occasion was the 63rd meeting of the Swiss Society for Psychiatry, which was held in Zurich, and where Minkowski presented his study of a case of ‘schizophrenic melancholy’ and of the disturbance of time which underpinned it, and where Binswanger discussed his views on phenomenology itself. (...)

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