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Existential Injustice in Phenomenological Psychopathology

This week, we welcome Daniel Vespermann (Heidelberg University) and Sanna Karoliina Tirkkonen (University of Helsinki) to present their recent paper Existential injustice in phenomenological psychopathology in Philosophical Psychology.

 

Sanna Karoliina Tirkkonen
 

In our paper “Existential injustice in phenomenological psychopathology”, we discuss a particular type of affective injustice. We start from the widely shared premise in phenomenological psychopathology that distressing alterations of background feelings play an important role in challenging mental health conditions. Background feelings are standing states that orient our evaluative perceptions of the world, shape emotional patterns, and regulate how we relate to others. In our paper, we refer to feelings of insecurity, self-blame, anxiety, estrangement, or inferiority as examples of distressing background feelings.

Phenomenological approaches to psychopathology usually treat alterations of background feelings as central factors for mental distress. At the same time, phenomenological approaches emphasize the role of embodied situatedness for understanding lived experience. However, the role of social contexts in shaping distressing affective alterations has rarely been the focus of phenomenological psychopathology.

Recent work in social psychiatry, in turn, has in various ways emphasized the great impact of social adversity on clinically relevant phenomena such as psychosis risk. Additional findings show significant socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in accessibility and incentives to seek professional help in mental health crises. We introduce two cases which suggest that adverse life situations contribute to mental distress by unjust alterations of background feelings.

The debate on affective injustice aims to capture how social injustice impacts individuals’ affective states. While the debate has developed rapidly within only a few years, the potential wronging of persistent affective states like background feelings remains underdeveloped. Since we presuppose a phenomenological perspective, we found especially two aspects wanting: 1) the identification of processes that can bring about the wronging of background feelings, and 2) how the wronging is reflected in first-person experiential structures.

Daniel Vespermann

Whereas these two explanatory aims are to reflect the phenomenological perspective, more general challenges arise from the specific characteristics of background feelings. How can we best capture the wronging of feeling states that are comparatively robust to change? How can we distinguish this wronging from the repeated wronging of episodic emotions? Initially, both challenges point to a structural dimension of wronging background feelings. Addressing the processual and structural dimensions, we present two conditions that can capture such a wronging.

First, the wrong may result from being cut off from benign socialization processes and interactions to recognize or shape one’s background feelings (we call this the access condition). Second, the wrong may result from continuous confrontation with social situations that shape background feelings in disadvantageous ways (the exposure condition). Because distressing alterations of background feelings have far-reaching consequences for one’s evaluative outlook on the world, possibilities of social connection, and action possibilities, we term this type of wronging existential injustice.

For capturing these two conditions phenomenologically, we argue that felt inadequacy of one’s background feelings is at the core of existential injustice. The notion of inadequacy emphasizes an alleged failure of complying with (social) emotion norms. Feeling inadequate reflects who one is as a person, and an impaired sense of agency. To rule out cases in which mental distress is not subject to injustice, we connect the felt inadequacy to imposed difficulties for regulating one’s background feelings. This may involve being deprived of means for redirecting one’s attention from distress or being constantly confronted with derogatory self-narratives. This way, discernible social processes translate the access and exposure conditions into lived experience.

In the final part of the paper, we show how existential injustice provides a fruitful angle for analyzing mental health trajectories in psychosis risk states and in anxiety during transitional life phases.

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