Temporal Double Orientation: The Case of Depressive Psychosis
Convenor and contact: Marcin Moskalewicz
Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - 5:00pm
Radcliffe Humanities Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG - Colin Matthew Room
Speaker: Marcin Moskalewicz (University of Oxford)
The TORCH Oxford Phenomenology Network are hosting a talk on ‘Temporal Double Orientation: The Case of Depressive Psychosis’ with Marcin Moskalewicz (University of Oxford, Philosophy):
'I will argue that dualistic accounts of time, as exemplified by Henri Bergson’s, Edmund Husserl’s and John McTaggart’s ideas, can be treated as symptoms of decomposition of normal temporal experience. Such a decomposition is not necessarily pathological as one may intentionally employ it for the sake of philosophical analysis. However, in its non-intentional depressive form it may lead to an estrangement from reality. The core of such an estrangement in depressive disorders can be rendered intelligible precisely by bringing the issue of temporal experience to the fore. In delusional psychotic depression, the individual temporal flow does not simply slow down but the (normally) unified temporal experience breaks apart into its “objective” and “subjective” counterparts. Further on, this breaking apart may take the form of a denial of the reality of time itself, a denial that is never fully acted upon, and, therefore, has the quality of a double orientation to reality characteristic of a non-acute psychosis.'
