The course aims to provide the Student with the basic knowledge required to apply the PHD method, namely:
life-world (the originary domain of a patient’s experience); dialectical principle (psychopathological symptoms are the result of a disproportion between the occurrence of alterity and the person’s capacity to make sense of it); dialogical principle (we are human insofar as we can engage in dialogue).
The know-how: the phenomenological unfolding (P) of the patient’s experiences, which equips the clinician and patient with a systematic knowledge of the abnormal phenomena that affect the patient and are part of her life-world; the hermeneutic moment (H), which focuses on the patient’s default interpretation of her experiences and then encourages her to actively take a different perspective towards her experiences, aiming at the resignification of these experiences in order to restore a sense of agency or responsibility; the psycho-dynamic moment (D), which aims to contextualize the patient’s psychopathological experiences and position-taking within the personal life-history in which they are embedded, and to trace back psychopathological symptoms to the limit-situation from which they emerge
The “something more” or knowing how-to-be: the psychotherapeutic dialogue as a kind of practice that moves in unpredictable directions to experience something new for both partners