Heidegger's philosophical thinking and its relevance to psychiatry

Heideggerian philosophy, especially the period of his thinking that culminated in his magnum opus Being and Time, has exerted significant influence within the phenomenological movement in psychiatry. Heidegger's philosophical life revolved around the question of Being and his attempts were focused in an overcoming of the metaphysics. In his essay "Science and reflection", that served as preparation for "The question concerning technology" attacks the compartmentalizing thinking of sciences and among them annotates psychiatry. For Heidegger, psychiatry embraces the traditional divide between "the healthy" and "the pathological" and attempts to represent them in objectness. The very existence of a discipline like psychiatry or psychopathology would be considered one more manifestation of modernity and a particular type of presencing that unavoidably is permeated by a tendency for objectification. Several times Heidegger warned against the anthropologization of his thinking as a fundamental misunderstanding of his ontology. Nevertheless, concepts from his philosophy, have served in order to shed light to subjective experiences deemed as instances of psychopathology. This oral presentation will attempt to trace these influences, question their leggitimacy as direct implications of Heidegger's thinking, but also explore the later phase of his inquiry in relation to psychiatry.