Book Review: When the World Collapses
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Book Review: When the World Collapses Kevin Aho: Contexts of Suffering. A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology. Rowman and Littlefield: London, 2019, 119 pp. + References and Index. Ppb. $44.95, Hdb. $135.00. Steven Taubeneck1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Over just a few months it could be said that our world has collapsed. Haunted by contagion, many have lost a sense of their future possibilities, if not of themselves. Kevin Aho’s book, published in late 2019, sheds light on problems suffered especially during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. On the basis of a well-informed reading of many of Martin Heidegger’s texts, from the early (1924) Concept of Time to the late (1959–1971) Zollikon Seminars, Aho derives an approach that can be applied to the growing psychopathologies of our time. Along the way, he brings together resources from phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics to argue for a thorough rethinking of biomedical psychiatry in the U.S. His book is a powerful example of transdisciplinary work at its most effective, particularly when applied to urgent problems in contemporary life. The “Introduction,” on “Heidegger and Psychiatry,” sets the stage for the book by establishing a framework for bringing philosophy and psychiatry together. Aho begins by proclaiming that “Modern psychiatry is in crisis” (p. xi). To be sure, there have been significant pharmaceutical breakthroughs in the treatment of mental illness. But at the same time many Americans seem more dissatisfied than ever. As a result, according to Aho, psychiatry itself has been called into question. Questions mount up, especially regarding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which now considers over 365 disorders. For Aho, the main problem with the field is its “biologically based approach that focuses almost exclusively on the use of medications to affect changes in brain chemistry” (p. xi). By contrast, Aho argues for a Heideggerian approach to psychotherapy that brings “the whole person and their irreducible social contexts back into the therapeutic encounter” (p. xii). In order to better treat someone as a whole person, the therapist should put aside the detached, biological emphasis of common practice and value the patient’s first-person perspective. * Steven Taubeneck [email protected] 1
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
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At first it may seem strange to bring Heidegger into the context of mental health. Wasn’t it Heidegger, after all, who wrote against humanism in his “Letter on Humanism?” And didn’t he, too, become a member of the Nazi Party, serve as the Rector of Freiburg University for a time under the Nazis, and compose the infamous Black Notebooks, which have recently exposed his polemical anti-Semitism? Aho admits these “darker” issues but follows Charles Guignon, his teacher and one of Heidegger’s more original interpreters, by finding “something less sinister afoot” (p. 116). As Heidegger wrote in his “Letter”: “It ought to be some
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