Possibility of Delirious Statement Interpretation as an Issue for “Philosophy of Psychiatry” (in Russian)

Abstract

“Philosophy of psychiatry” is an interdisciplinary research domain spanning psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and other sciences. The possibility of understanding and interpreting delirious statements is one of the key issues in this area. Different approaches to the interpretation of delirious utterances are analyzed, in particular, the position of K. Jaspers, who postulated the “limits of understanding” the mental illness, and the attempts to provide mechanisms for interpretation of the delirious content made in the contemporary “philosophy of psychiatry”. Several approaches to conceptualizing delirious propositions are presented, including the positions of G. Berrios, who proposes to consider them as empty statements, the ideas of B. Maher and M. Davies, who see delirious statements as reactions to abnormal experience, and the “rationalistic approach” by J. Campbell and L. Sass, which views them as expressions of disorder of the designation mechanism. Each of these positions is explored in the paper, and the resulting approaches to the limits of interpretation are shown. Clinical cases are presented that provide examples of analysis by means of exploring the changes in the “basic positions”, that is, the transformation of assumptions that form the basis of reality perception in persons with mental disorder. Also, the author discusses the implications of delirious statement interpretability of delirious statements for psychiatric practice and for future interdisciplinary study, in particular, the way it influences the contribution of different disciplines to the explanation of mental disorder.