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Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a complex condition marked by heterogeneity. People with BPD have a profusion of symptoms spread across various levels of lived experience, such as identity, affectivity, and interpersonal relationships. Researchers and clinicians have often resorted to the structuring concept of Self to organize the fragmentation of their experience at the identity level. Notably, using the concept of the narrative self, Fuchs proposed to interpret BPD as a fragmentation of narrative identity. This interpretation of BPD, widely shared, has been challenged by Gold and Kyratsous, who have proposed a complementary understanding of the self through the idea of agency, and to which Schmidt and Fuchs in turn have countered. This article proposes to contribute to this discussion from a phenomenological perspective. First, we will briefly review the discussions around narrative interpretation of BPD. From the problems left unresolved by the discussion, we will then justify the necessity to proceed with a stratification of the self from a phenomenology method. Third, from the thought of the Hungarian phenomenologist László Tengelyi, we will continue with an archaeology of the self, in three layers – self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self – integrating Schmidt and Fuchs' concepts of self, in addition to those of Gold and Kyratsous, but also, to a lesser extent, those of Dan Zahavi. Finally, we will proceed with a phenomenological reconfiguration of the experiences and manifestations associated with the identity axis of BPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Praecox Feeling" (PF) is a classical concept referring to a characteristic feeling of bizarreness experienced by a psychiatrist while encountering a person with schizophrenia. Although the PF used to be considered a core symptom of the schizophrenia spectrum, it fell into disuse since the spread of operationalized diagnostic methods (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders / International Classification of Diseases systems). In contemporary research on schizophrenia, it remains largely unaddressed. This critical review investigates the evolution of the PF in historical and contemporary literature and presents an exhaustive overview of empirical evidence on its prevalence in clinical decision making, its reliability and validity. The review demonstrates that the PF is a real determinant of medical decision making in schizophrenia, although, without further research, there is not enough evidence to sustain its rehabilitation as a reliable and valid clinical criterion. PF-like experiences should not be opposed to any criteriological attitude in diagnosis and would be clinically useful if the conditions of descriptive precaution and rigorous epistemology are maintained. The aim of teaching clinical expertise is to transform this basic experience into a well-founded clinical judgment. Finally, the article discusses the possible relevance of the PF for basic science and clinical research according to a translational approach inspired by phenomenology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: According to Karl Jaspers, psychopathology requires a comprehensive method, understood as a systematic exploration of the first-person perspective of the patient's experience. At the same time, however, schizophrenia for Jaspers is characterized by its radical incomprehensibility. In addition, Rümke's so-called "praecox feeling" paradoxically combines the incomprehensibility of schizophrenic experience and the evidence of its pathological manifestation in the encounter. Aim: Through a re-examination of the notions of affectivity and interaffective contact we propose a coherent theoretical model to explain the clinician's paradoxical understanding of schizophrenia. Method: Phenomenological tradition regards affectivity as an encompassing phenomenon that connects body, self, world, and others. In our view, only a thorough and systematic link between corporeity and affectivity is able to explain embodied affective resonance as a basis of empathic comprehension. By drawing on the phenomenology of Marc Richir, we will systematically unfold the complex nature of affectivity and lead it back to a twofold constitution of corporeality. Conclusion: The Richirian account on affectivity can be fruitfully put into discussion with other recent phenomenological models on schizophrenia. It might be able to exhibit affectivity as the operative ground of minimal self-disturbance and thus argue for its intersubjective dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of the SARS-Cov-2 virus epidemic, the Ambulatory Care Unit of the Toulouse University Hospital Center, offering institutional psychotherapeutic care to people with severe and/or disabling psychiatric pathologies, closed its doors to patients on the 16th of March 2020. This article aims to document the necessary adjustments to the care setting during this extraordinary period. As it was, the team had to tell patients to stay at home and to respect rules of social distancing. An inescapable paradox when our work consists precisely in de-confining, connecting, being in contact with each other. Face-to-face meetings, group workshops, the array of our mediations were suspended; the challenge for us was to bring to light what is irreducible or essential in the institutional psychotherapeutic care for psychoses, what must remain active through the confinement. These modifications of the psychotherapeutic setting will be described in terms of constructing a virtual mental institution , based on a setting twisted by the distance but not abolished, telephone consultations opening up to a speculative but not disembodied psychopathological imaginary, and finally a blog as a quasi-materialization of a virtual space. This experience led the team of the Ambulatory Care Unit to radicalize the institution to keep it in its simplest apparatus: a virtual tree structure of the mental institution. The prior interactions between caregivers and patients have been translated (and thus re-created) virtually. As to respect their singular aspects, as well as their fundamental belonging to the collective that supports our institution. This virtual mental institution can therefore maintain the framework that structures our institutional care project, and can link the before and what will be the after of the confinement. For this study, we have conducted an "on-the-spot" analysis of the concrete arrangements of our therapeutic setting from an interdisciplinary perspective: phenomenological, systemic and psychodynamic., (© 2020 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.)