Prof. Dr. Anna Bergqvist (Manchester Metropolitan University - UK) The Phenomenology of Mutual Trust and Self-Ownership in Borderline Personality Disorder: Reassessing Hope in Recovery

 July 20, 2021

h. 16.45 CET

Prof. Dr. Anna Bergqvist (Manchester Metropolitan University - UK) The Phenomenology of Mutual Trust and Self-Ownership in Borderline Personality Disorder: Reassessing Hope in Recovery

Abstract: In this work, I deploy recent philosophical and empirical work on self-ownership in mental illness and the distinctive phenomenology of mutual trust in healing relational crises, intrapsychic conflicts and identity disturbance to show that the complex relationship between agentic awareness and that of narrative self-creation in dissonance cases is best understood integratively against the wider background of a subject’s intersubjective agency. I argue that the phenomenology of mutual trust is conceptually and ontogenetically prior to individual self-ownership in clinical cases involving an unstable sense of self, for which reason fractions to this and other intersubjective aspects of shared engagements play a significant explanatory role in understanding the phenomenology of identity disturbance in psychological dissociation characteristic of adults with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This and other relational aspects of shared engagements in psychotherapy are not usually highlighted the literature on ownership and the phenomenology of joint action. The relational dimension of my account is central because, and in so far as, therapeutic hope points towards as second-person dimension of subjectivity – even in breakdown of social cognition and joint attention.

 

Bio:
Prof. Dr. Anna Bergqvist is Reader in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University specialising in metaethics (esp. moral perception) and philosophy of psychiatry with a focus on self-ownership and relational moral agency. Bergqvist is Secretary of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) Section for Philosophy & Humanities in Psychiatry (October 2020 – present) and is an Executive Committee Member of the Royal College of Psychiatry (RCPsych) SIG in Philosophy (February 2020 – present). She is also Convener of the Values-based Theory Network at St Catherine’s Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice at the University of Oxford, and Member of its Whiteness and Race Equality Network. She is currently Co-Investigator for a major 4-year project, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Policy Research Programme, to improve patient experience in reforming the Mental Health Act. She is also leading an AHRC-funded project with the Mental Health Foundation, including a collaborative PhD studentship award, to develop a new public mental health approach to severe and enduring mental illness (SMI).

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Lectures and Discussions will be held in English