Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate
Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate
Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate
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THE ROLE OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS 149<br />
Both retention <strong>and</strong> protention have to be distinguished from the proper<br />
thematic) recollection <strong>and</strong> expectation. There is an obvious difference between<br />
retaining <strong>and</strong> protending the tones that have just sounded <strong>and</strong> are<br />
just about to sound, <strong>and</strong> to remember a past holiday, or look forward to the<br />
next vacation. Whereas the two latter experiences presuppose the work of the<br />
retention <strong>and</strong> the protention, the protention <strong>and</strong> retention are intrinsic<br />
moments of any occurrent experience I might be having. They provide us<br />
with consciousness of the temporal horizon of the present object, they are<br />
the a priori structures of our consciousness, structures which are the very<br />
condition of temporal experience. They are passive or automatic processes<br />
that take place without our active contribution.<br />
Comprehending the structure of time-consciousness proves crucial if we<br />
for instance wish to underst<strong>and</strong> the important syntheses of identity: if I move<br />
around a tree in order to obtain a more exhaustive presentation of it, then<br />
the different profiles of the tree, its front, sides <strong>and</strong> back, do not present<br />
themselves as disjointed fragments, but are perceived as synthetically integrated<br />
moments. This synthetic process is temporal in nature. Ultimately,<br />
time-consciousness must be regarded as the formal condition of possibility<br />
for the constitution of any objects [36, 37].<br />
Intentionality<br />
An intrinsic, fundamental feature of consciousness is its object-directedness<br />
or intentionality. One does not merely love, fear, see or judge; one loves,<br />
fears, sees or judges something. In short, it characterizes many of our experiences,<br />
that they are exactly conscious of something. Regardless of whether<br />
we are talking of a perception, a thought, a judgement, a fantasy, a doubt, an<br />
expectation, a recollection, etc., all of these diverse forms of consciousness<br />
are characterized by intending objects, <strong>and</strong> they cannot be analyzed properly<br />
without a look at their objective correlate, i.e. the perceived, doubted,<br />
expected object. Likewise, affectivity discloses also intentional structure:<br />
whereas feelings are about the objects of feelings, moods exhibit a global<br />
intentionality of horizons of being by coloring the world <strong>and</strong> so exp<strong>and</strong>,<br />
restrict or modify our existential possibilities.<br />
The decisive question is how to account for this intentionality. One<br />
common suggestion is to reduce intentionality to causality. According to<br />
this view consciousness can be likened to a container. In itself it has no<br />
relation to the world; only if it is causally influenced by an external object<br />
can such a relation occur. That this model is severely inadequate is easy to<br />
show. The real existing spatial objects in my immediate physical surrounding<br />
only constitute a minority of that of which I can be conscious. When I am<br />
thinking about absent objects, impossible objects, non-existing objects, future