Is what and who you are the same thing as what it means?
Phenomenology and the Situated Sense of Self
Phenomenology, understood as the meaningful system of appearances, reduces thoughts and feelings to the content of a Being that is outside of materiality to thus contain it. Of course, materialism as a school of thought will reject this summary, but that is why mental health is something different because it explains how it is possible that materialism exists.
When we actually encounter ourselves in , the containment of material, and what it implies in meaning, is the limited and specific sense in which the waking self appears in this context. Meaning, in this situation, is not applied to reality; rather, meaning itself is the extension that amounts to reality in the manner described (in how we actually talk about it).
However, Reality, as encountered here, is upheld such that an external “other” phenomenon becomes the more regularly referenced point through which one reflects upon a sense of self.
Sense as Defense and the Constitution of Reality
The defense is the usual sense os self. It constitutes reality by being part of the meaningful correlation in such a way so that material essence is relegated to “nothing,” “phantoms,” or “illusions”—which are themselves still meaningful.
From this orientation arises the basis of existentialism: an apology for the remaining sense of self as a self-Being that is able to choose. This repeats the Cartesian and phenomenological ontology of the knower and the known.
The Knower–Known Structure and Mental Health
Validation of an Exceptional System of Meaning
The link between the knower and the known is the phenomenological problem and forms the basis of what are called mental issues or mental disorders. This structure validates an exceptional self and its exclusive system of meaning, which ironically becomes the basis for the experience of having a problem.
Continuum of Formed Human Beings
A discussion remains to be had regarding discernment across the continuum of formed human beings, for example as suggested by phenomena such as autism or schizophrenia.
Communication, Reality, and Identification
Mental health issues arise insofar as the system of particular meanings that coordinates an exclusive self contradicts what it supposes itself to communicate. Communication itself demands that meanings appear as other meaningful subjects. In this demand, people find reality in a mistaken situation in which they must—and cannot otherwise—find themselves as beings in reality.
The person thus identifies themselves with a conglomerate of what is taken to be real material.
Overdetermination and Underdetermination of Meaning
The issue of mental health here is not meaning itself, but the overdetermination and underdetermination of meaning. This mode of identification is problematic in relation to the dynamic nature of the universe.
This ontological reckoning has been described as overmining and undermining.
Misrecognition and the Experience of Missing Oneself
The problem arises insofar as the thing that is itself does not recognize itself in reality. In terms of mental health, the person exists in a dilemma of “missing” themselves.
Undermining and Overmining the Self
This misrecognition can take the form of undermining oneself through negative self-talk, or overmining the power that the world has upon oneself through social inequality, biological physiology, brain chemistry, personal history, family upbringing, and similar determinations. While these factors are real, identifying oneself with them can undermine agency.
This is lived as the experience of being affected by forces without consent—and indeed, this is precisely how it is experienced.
Trauma, Identity Fixation, and Post-Traumatic Stasis
Many contemporary trauma therapies work to interrupt this reiteration of identity—this condition of missing oneself or “not being here”—which otherwise fixes (ridged, immovable, solution) the person in an emotional post-traumatic stasis.
Heightened startle response, intrusive thoughts, and similar phenomena are examples of forces asserting control over the person without consent. Treatment for PTSD often involves helping the person stop identifying with experience in that particular manner, namely the manner of identification that is at root in the problem.
Recognition, Flexibility, and Interruption of Identification
To recognize oneself—literally, to know again—requires flexibility in thinking, which supports understanding, and resilience in the challenging feelings that accompany changes not only in how reality is reckoned, but in how it is presently experienced.
But, if there is not problem, then there is no problem. There is no reason or need to make a problem out of something that is not already come upon as a problem.
Identification with experience is interrupted sufficiently when it is needed to be renegotiated, whether through cognitive (such as thinking about things), semi-cognitive (such as feeling one’s body and sensations), or supra-cognitive (such as religious, spiritual or transcendental experiences) therapeutic means. In each case, the interruption of identification is the condition for recognition rather than an addition to it.
This is not so much a suggestion of something new to do or an intervention. This is more about what is actually happening given the conditions by which we know ourselves, as those considerations operate as known things, that is, to be knowable.
The Argument of Mental Health Philosophy
Description and argument: Discerning Resentment and Bias in Philosophy.