SONATA BIS-11 nr 2021/42/E/HS1/00106

This project is part of the transdisciplinary research area referred to as the philosophy of psychiatry. The project combines and confronts the basic concepts of transcendental phenomenology of time consciousness and phenomenological psychopathology with the results of qualitative and quantitative research. Its goal is to study the disorders of time experience in four groups of so-called mental illnesses - addictions, autism spectrum, borderline personality disorder and mood disorders. The main rationale for undertaking the study is the thesis of phenomenological psychopathology, which states that in the above-mentioned groups of disorders, atypical time experience is the nucleus around which all other symptoms focus. In other words, disorders of time experience constitute the phenomenological “core” of the disease. This thesis is very well established philosophically, although to varying degrees for different types of disorders, and partially empirically, while the rank of scientific evidence supporting it is, by the standards of positivist quantitative research, rather weak.

Accordingly, the research will be carried out at four levels: first, at the level of strictly philosophical analysis on the reflection on time experience disorders in Anglo-Saxon, French, and German phenomenological psychopathology; second, at the level of analysis of the results of qualitative research in the field of applied phenomenology in psychiatry and clinical psychology; third, at the level of empirical research conducted based on phenomenological structured interviews; fourth, at the level of empirical survey research. In the first instance, the results of philosophical reflection and qualitative research will be transformed into falsifiable scientific hypotheses. In the second instance, these hypotheses will be confronted with empirical material in the form of psychiatric patients' experiences objectified into third-person data captured on quantitative scales. This aspect of the project is in line with the idea of so-called front-loaded phenomenology, as the empirical material will be collected from the angle and with the help of concepts of phenomenological provenance. 

The empirical research will include four groups of patients - in the case of structured interviews, each group will consist of min. 50 people, in the case of surveys min. 440 people. Quota selection in terms of gender, age and symptom severity will be used in order to compare the distributions of time experience disorders with the clinical picture. Ultimately, the results obtained from the empirical research will be used to conduct a secondary philosophical analysis summarizing the project. Its goal will be to derive meaningful conclusions enriching the discourse of phenomenological psychopathology at the level of theories on time experience disorders. The quantitatively tangible result of the project, in turn, will be the knowledge of the frequency, severity and subjectively understood dysfunctionality of time experience disorders, which will enable comparison with the severity of typical symptoms in the clinical picture.

Ultimately, we aim to compare anomalous temporal experiences with standard clinical symptoms by transforming philosophical and qualitative insights into testable hypotheses. This will enhance the discourse on phenomenological psychopathology and provide empirical data on the prevalence, intensity, and subjective impact of these experiences.