Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate

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