Phenomenology as an Approach Method in the Neurosciences

IVANA ANTON MLINAR

Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update: Bridging the Divide

Springer

Lugar: New York / Dordrecht / London; Año: 2015; p. 11 - 22

Phenomenology has become of great interest to neurosciences because of its ?embodied? analysis of the experience that distinguishes between bodies as objectivities [Körper] ?spatial-temporally determined and given to a subjectivity? and lived body [Leib] ?both ?bearer? of an ego as well as physical body. This last sense reveals the body as the organ of perception, since it serves in constituent functions that allow the very access to the objects and to the others, making the possession of an objective world possible. The living body also reveals itself as intentional body in a preeminent way in the experience of pain, because it is the person, as intentional unity, who hurts, and it is not possible to assimilate it to a neurovegetative third person level. Motivational connection becomes, therefore, the fundamental law by which the unity of all the animic is comprehended, even the passive strata of the soul, association, feelings and impulses. Phenomenological conception and evidence of selfhood as this whole would not allow to be assimilated with the program of neurophenomenology that reduces the phenomenological method to a first person introspectionist gaze, whose reports must reach a synthesis, find their correlate and mutual validation with the data provided by third person neurological studies. Phenomenology, on the contrary, makes patent that consciousness does not present any physical localization, but it is a ?sphere? of convergence of human operations, alien to the ?first or third person? distinction.