Philosophical Investigations On Psychotherapy

The Philosophy of Science and Technology is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods, and implications of science&technology, together with their social effects. The rise of modern Physics and its related technology promote the building and booming of Philosophy of Science and Technology, yet its full-fledged development also requires the findings from other disciplines like Biology and Psychology, which is rather different from physics in many aspects. To contribute to this field, this dissertation tries to address the philosophical investigation on Psychotherapy, which is a domain of technology specially for solving mental problems. Understanding these problems requires fundamental categories which define the axis of the coordinate system, so the approach in this dissertation is to select the basic categories which illuminate the structure of the subject, be it normal or abnormal, and to illustrate that how do they interweave with the concepts and phenomena in clinical practice.Six categories were selected and investigated as Time, Space, Language, Body, Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity. Time and Space are the basic axes in constellating the outside world as well as the inside world, which manifest their diversity and vicissitudes in the clinical field for their disruptions and brokenness. The distortions of inner time and inner space are parameters of Psychopathology, which were revealed in mental symptoms. Parallel with these axes, language and body are dimensions which embodied the time and space in appreciable subjective world, because language as an ordering structure unique for human implies and implicates the inner sense of time, and the body is the first and foremost space perceived by mind, the base point of all kinds of spaces. These are facades of subject, the object for psychotherapy. While the subjects are born out of intersubjective matrix according to an object relation theory point of view, a culture loaded set that cannot be neglected if we do therapy with people from any culture. Based on all the categories illustrated above, the author applies the Phenomenological-Hermeneutical method to clinical practice, and thus yields a pair of novel category---Accident vis-a-vis Story, which could be put to use for understanding psychopathology and psychotherapy process. The disruption or derangement of Zeitbewuβtsein (consciousness of inner time) is the differential characteristic for Accident, whose transformation relies on the Stories co-created by patient-therapist dyad, plus multiple narrative scaffolds. This is a new dimension for interpreting clinical phenomena, a synthesis work for fostering the cross-fertilization between Phenomenology and Psychotherapy, which itself is an attempt to re-narrative Psychoanalytic story in the Chinese context. While the barycentre for this research in not on Philosophy but on Investigation, the philosophy background and the conceptual argumentation are necessary only when they are relevant with the clinical work, so five cases were illustrated in order to interweave and integrate these categories in clinical practice, from which Accident was transformed into Stoiy, together with the changes of inner time, inner space, language and body in a symphonic way.As a supplement and extension of the above research, the author also made some possible dialogues between Buddhism, Traditional Chinese Medicine and modern Psychotherapy. An meta-category, Reducing and Reforcing was introduced to govern the countless strategies in psychotherapy; the existence and non-existence of subject were compared between Buddhism and main stream Psychotherapy, which can shed some lights on further research for the localization of psychotherapy in contemporary China. An integrative and indigenized system for Psychotherapy, which took consider the heritages of Hellenic/Hebrew/Hindu tradition, and the rich legacy of Chinese culture was suggested in the end of this work as a primer for awakening.