Thomas Fuchs

Heidelberg University · Department of General Psychiatry

Gefühle gelten nach herrschender Auffassung als mentale Zustände, die in einer verborgenen Innenwelt des Subjekts bzw. in seinem Gehirn zu lokalisieren sind. Eine verkörperte Konzeption hingegen begreift Gefühle als umfassende Phänomene, die Selbst und Welt in leiblicher Resonanz miteinander verbinden. Auch die Intersubjektivität beginnt nicht mit...

Zusammenfassung Die psychotherapeutischen Verfahren des humanistischen Clusters stehen in der Gegenwart vor mehreren Herausforderungen: Einerseits durch das neue Psychotherapiegesetzes (2024) in Österreich und das damit einhergehende Desiderat einer methodenübergreifenden, clusterweiten Forschung; andererseits durch die Situation der humanistischen...

This paper synthesizes research on temporal experience in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) from a phenomenologically grounded perspective. It advocates for a closer integration of phenomenology with empirical research results, with the specific goal of bridging the gap between theoretical and evidence-based understanding of BPD temporality. Ut...

Zusammenfassung: Der Aufsatz charakterisiert zunächst das epistemische Vertrauen, das wir in andere und in die gemeinsame Realität setzen, und das auf einem frühkindlich erworbenen Grundvertrau en beruht. Davon ausgehend untersucht er das Phänomen der Verschwörungstheorien, die aus dem Verlust des epistemischen Vertrauens resultieren und letztlich...

Debates concerning the reliability and validity of operationalized criteria and diagnostic tools have surrounded the issue of schizophrenia diagnosis and clinical decision-making related to the disorder. The notion of the praecox feeling (PF) has played a prominent role in the discussions as an example of the possibility of a rapid and potentially...

Not only our conscious expectations, wishes and intentions are directed towards the future, but also pre-or unconscious tendencies, hunches and anticipations. Using a term coined by Ernst Bloch, they can be summarized as the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-consciousness usually unfolds spontaneously and without a plan; it is not expected or striven...

The conference aims to present and discuss the possibilities of overcoming the gap between phenomenological and other research methodologies by integrating quantitative empirical evidence with phenomenological analysis and developing hybrid solutions. We aim to explore possibilities to improve the validity and reliability of evidence, hypothesis te...

This chapter sheds light on phenomenological aspects of personality disorders. Although research on personality disorders (PD) has increased in the last decades, it remains relatively underexamined compared to other mental health conditions. This discrepancy is even more evident in phenomenological psychopathology. To fill this lacuna, this chapter...

Background Diagnostic criteria for mental disorders are subject to change. This is particularly true for schizophrenia, whose diagnostic criteria in the current DSM-5 bear little resemblance to what Kraepelin once named “dementia praecox” and Bleuler termed “the schizophrenias.” The present study reports results from a survey of experts on two core...

The current view of man on himself is characterized by a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, man attributes to himself the godlike power to generate artificial intelligence, artificial life or even consciousness. On the other hand, there is a deep pessimism coupled with human self-contempt. Post-humanism, in its more radical variants, ascribes itsel...

Was den gesunden Menschen vor Delirien und Halluzinationen bewahrt, ist nicht sein kritischer Geist, sondern die Struktur seines Raumes: die Dinge bleiben vor ihm stehen, sie wahren Abstand und berühren ihn […] nur mit Respekt. Halluzinationen und Mythen hingegen entstehen aus einer Schrumpfung des Lebensraumes, einem Wurzelschlagen der Dinge in un...

Disorders of temporal experience feature prominently in classical phenomenological psychopathology, regarding mostly disorders of moods and affects, but also substance use, compulsions, and schizophrenia. More recent advances in qualitative phenomenology have expanded the array of atypical experiences of interest (e.g., toward personality disorders...

Though negative symptoms and social difficulties are significant sources of disability in patients with schizophrenia, they are poorly studied compared to delusions and hallucinations. In parallel, there are calls for a shift in our understanding of psychiatric diseases, towards viewing them as disorders of social interaction. We argue that an embo...

With the widespread use of masks in the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to understand how emotion recognition is affected by partial face covering. Since individuals with autism spectrum condition often tend to look at the lower half of the face, they are likely to be particularly restricted in emotion recognition by people wearing masks, since th...

This chapter investigates more fundamentally the conditions of possibility for humans to become mentally ill in the first place. The fact that persistent mental disorders do not occur in free-living animals speaks for an anthropological vulnerability, i.e. a specific mental endangerment of humans. The paper examines several reasons for this vulnera...

Since the first description by Leo Kanner, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been attributed a reduced empathy. However, it has not yet been clarified how empathy is specifically impaired in autism. Typically, scholars distinguish between the affective and the cognitive dimensions of empathy. The latter largely overlaps with the...

Kurt Schneider has played a leading role in shaping our current view of schizophrenia, placing certain manifestations of delusions and hallucinations at the center of the disorder, especially ideas of persecution and voice-hearing. The first part of this review summarizes Schneider’s original ideas and then traces how the different editions of the...

Human Flourishing in a Technological World addresses questions of human identity and flourishing in light of modern technological developments. The chapters in Part I provide a philosophical-theological evaluation of changing major anthropological assumptions that have guided human self-understanding from antiquity to modernity: How did we move fro...

We provide here the first bottom‐up review of the lived experience of depression, co‐written by experts by experience and academics. First‐person accounts within and outside the medical field were screened and discussed in collaborative workshops involving numerous individuals with lived experience of depression, family members and carers, represen...

Der Tastsinn weist eine mehrfache Polarität auf, die ihn unter allen Sinnen als Sinn der Grenze, des Kontakts und des Übergangs auszeichnet. Er ist zum einen rezeptiv (er reagiert auf Kontakt), zum anderen aktiv (er erkundet die Dinge durch Bewegung). Er ist einerseits selbstkonstituierend, nämlich durch die Erfahrung der Selbstberührung und der Se...

Introduction Basic self-disorders on the one hand and motor symptoms on the other hand are discussed as endophenotypes of schizophrenia psychopathology. However, the systematic interaction between motor symptoms and the self-experience of patients is rarely studied. Methods In a previous study we defined motor markers of schizophrenia via a data-d...

Die gegenwärtige Sicht des Menschen auf sich selbst gekennzeichnet von einer tiefen Ambivalenz. Einerseits misst sich der Mensch die gottgleiche Macht zu, künstliche Intelligenz, künstliches Leben oder sogar Bewusstsein zu erzeugen. Auf der anderen Seite steht ein tiefer Pessimismus, gepaart mit menschlicher Selbstverachtung. Der Posthumanismus in...

Large language models such as ChatGPT are deep learning architectures trained on immense quantities of text. Their capabilities of producing human-like text are often adributed either to mental capacities or the modeling of such capacities. This paper argues, to the contrary, that because much of meaning is embedded in common paderns of language us...

This paper presents and discusses a manuscript by one of the core founders of phenomenological psychopathology, Erwin W. Straus, concerning psychotic disorders of space and time (see attached Supplementary material). Written in June 1946, the manuscript is published for the first time as supplementary material to this paper. It is a clinical case-s...

At the present state of discourse, the issue of incomprehensibility is clouded by unresolved problems. We propose that this confusion stems from three distinct sources. In the following, we elaborate on each of them and advance a schema for structuring the discourse on schizophrenic incomprehensibility (see table 1): 1. Overreliance on delusional...

Introduction: Mental health comorbidities such as depression and anxiety are common in epilepsy, especially among people with pharmacoresistant epilepsy who are candidates for epilepsy surgery. The Psychology Task Force of the International League Against Epilepsy advised that psychological interventions should be integrated into comprehensive epi...

Mental health comorbidities are frequent in epilepsy. Consequently, psychotherapy is becoming increasingly important. To address the psychological needs of people with epilepsy (PwE) it is essential to understand the subjective experiences of seizures better. There is little research on how people report seizures, and which psychological representa...

This book examines the relationship between personhood and vulnerability in dementia from a phenomenological–anthropological research perspective. The disease poses existential challenges to patients affected by it and their social environment in private, nursing and medical settings. Therefore, in interdisciplinary contributions, this study explor...

According to Soren Kierkegaard, despair is genuinely a matter of the human mind. Because man is mind, he despairs. This makes despair a key phenomenon from which the mental nature of man can be disclosed in its fundamental ambivalence. The anthology explores the importance of despair for a philosophical approach to what it means to be human in its...

Not only our conscious expectations, wishes and intentions are directed towards the future, but also pre- or unconscious tendencies, hunches and anticipations. Using a term of Ernst Bloch, they can be summarized as the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-conscious mostly unfolds spontaneously and without plan; it is not directly anticipated or aimed at...

Tradução de Deborah Moreira Guimarães e Luís Gabriel Provinciatto

Vertrauen zu können, stellt eine soziale Kompetenz dar, die zwischenmenschliche Bindung aufbauen, soziale Komplexität reduzieren und Entwicklungsprozesse anstoßen kann. Da Vertrauen zu schenken mit Risiken verbunden ist und der Vertrauende sich verletzbar macht, setzt diese Kompetenz auch eine strukturelle Bereitschaft der Person voraus – das sogen...

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) create an increasing similarity between the performance of AI systems or AI-based robots and human communication. They raise the questions: whether it is possible to communicate with, understand, and even empathically perceive artificial agents; whether we should ascribe actual subjectivity and thus quasi-pe...

Im Verhältnis von Philosophie und Psychologie ist die Frage nach dem, was unter dem Begriff der Erfahrung verstanden wird, zentral. Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft Philosophie & Psychologie veranstaltet zu diesem Thema unter dem Titel „Erfahrung und Empirie“ vom 19. bis zum 22. September 2022 eine interdisziplinäre Konferenz an der Universität Heidelberg....

The variety of symptoms associated with schizophrenia are not easily unified under one coherent concept. Nevertheless, under the gaze of phenomenology, a disturbance of pre-reflexive experience has become increasingly apparent as the basis of the condition, which has so far been understood in two different ways: on the one hand, as a disturbance of...

Zusammenfassung „Nichts ist, wie es scheint“, „nichts geschieht zufällig“, und „alles ist miteinander verbunden“ – diese drei Grundannahmen charakterisieren Verschwörungstheorien unterschiedlicher Provenienz. Damit zeigen sie eine deutliche Parallelität zur Struktur von paranoidem Bedeutungserleben und Wahn. Dem stehen jedoch wichtige Unterschiede...

Die Frage, warum es psychische Krankheit gibt, lässt sich mit Verweis auf biologische, psychologische oder soziale Bedingungen, Faktoren und Zusammenhänge beantworten. Die psychiatrische Anthropologie fragt hingegen grundlegender nach den Voraussetzungen dafür, dass Menschen überhaupt psychisch erkranken können. Nicht zuletzt die Tatsache, dass bei...

The distinction of „understanding“ and „explaining“, formulated by Karl Jaspers in his „General Psychopathology“, has had a lasting effect on psychiatry. As a result, phenomenological, hermeneutic, or psychodynamic approaches have often been accorded only descriptive or epiphenomenal status, while the actual causes of mental illness have been sough...

The social challenges in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can present as qualitative differences in interactions that make individuals on the autism spectrum appear less engaged with others. Limited interactional synchrony and other nonverbal movement patterns may contribute to these qualitative differences. This article uses the case of Hans, an ad...

Die Einführung operationalisierter Diagnosesysteme hat zwar zu einer Präzisierung der Diagnostik geführt, jedoch auch zu einem Rückgang psychopathologischer Erfahrung und Intuition. Daher sollten phänomenologische Ansätze der zwischenleiblichen, intuitiven Diagnostik künftig wieder stärker berücksichtigt und in der Ausbildung eingeübt werden. Der A...

Phenomenological approaches suggest that the bodily presence of others has a profound influence on the experience of social spaces. This intimate relationship is particularly evident in mental disorders. Investigations into the nature of intersubjectivity in various pathologies indicate that modifications to the capacity for social perception play...

Motor abnormalities occur in the majority of persons with schizophrenia but are generally neglected in clinical care. Psychiatric diagnostics fail to include quantifiable motor variables and few assessment tools examine full-body movement. We assessed full-body movement during gait of 20 patients and 20 controls with motion capture technology, symp...

Die Veränderungen des Selbst- und Welterlebens bei Menschen mit Schizophrenie sind in den letzten Jahren in den Fokus der Erforschung und Behandlung der Erkrankung gerückt. Das Buch enthält die erste deutsche Übersetzung der beiden ausführlichen phänomenologischen Interviews EASE und EAWE zur Entfassung dieser oft nur schwer beschreibbaren Erfahrun...

The establishment of criteriological diagnostic systems since the 1980s has increased the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis. On the other hand, the limits of this approach for clinicians and researchers are becoming increasingly apparent. In particular, the assessment of subjective experience is nearly excluded on the theoretical level and under...

Using phenomenological and ecological psychology as a base, the author develops the concept of lived space as the totality of an individual's spatial and social relationships, including his ”horizon of possibilities”. The lived space may also be regarded as the individual's ecological niche, which is continuously shaped by his exchange with the env...

Anorexia nervosa is often regarded primarily as a disorder of the body image, with affected individuals submitting themselves to the dictate of a predominant model of slenderness. However, even though this frequently functions as a gateway to the disorder, the paper intends to show that the actual conflict in anorexia consists in a fundamental alie...

Zusammenfassung: Theorien der Verkörperung beruhen auf der Annahme,dass kognitive Prozesse intrinsisch verkörpert sind, und messen der Interaktion von Körper und Umwelt entscheidende Bedeutung für die Möglichkeit von Bewusstsein zu. Seit den neunziger Jahren wird dieser verkörperungstheoretische Grundgedanke insbesondere vom Enaktivismus vertreten....

Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics increasingly call into question the distinction between simulation and reality of the human person. On the one hand, they suggest a computeromorphic understanding of human intelligence, and on the other, an anthropomorphization of AI systems. In other words: We increasingly conceive of ourselves in t...

The variety of symptoms associated with schizophrenia are not easily unified under one coherent concept. Nevertheless, under the gaze of phenomenology, a disturbance of pre-reflexive experience has become increasingly apparent as the basis of the condition, which has so far been understood in two different ways: on the one hand, as a disturbance of...

In questo volume il lettore trova e ha l'opportunità di familiarizzare con alcuni degli strumenti che Thomas Fuchs utilizza in psicopatologia, in particolare nel contesto della psicopatologia fenomenologica. L'intento è di offrire finalmente al lettore italiano alcuni dei testi più paradigmatici dell'attività di questo autore, filosofo e psichiatra...

In this article, we present holistic and person-centered perspectives in psychiatry, with the aim of better understanding what a focus on personhood might really mean and what clinical implications it might have. We first introduce classical and philosophical concepts of personhood, in order to then outline person-centered approaches in psychiatry,...

With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the life world and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more as a product of data and algorithms. We understand ourselves in the image of our machines, while conversely we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. Against this...

Do we find what makes up a person in the brain? And, if one could transplant a brain, would that also transfer the person into a new organism? Advances in neuroscience have promoted an identification of person and brain that is incompatible with the reality of the human person. Persons are necessarily embodied, i.e., they show themselves, they act...

In an age of growing virtual communication, the question arises what role human empathy plays in virtual relations. In order to answer this question, the paper distinguishes between: (1) primary, intercorporeal empathy; (2) extended empathy which is based perspective-taking; and (3) fictional empathy which is directed to imagined or fictitious pers...

Naturalistic and constructivist theories of cognition conceive of experienced reality as an internal simulation of the external world, which is generated from sensory data in the brain. In this way, they ascribe to perception a fundamentally illusory character compared to physical reality. The chapter contrasts this with an enactive conception of h...

In debates on free will it is often claimed that all human actions are determined by neural mechanisms preceding the decision as well as the initiation of action. The phenomenology of the decision, on the other hand, is attributed to a disembodied subject whose powerlessness in the face of physical processes is considered unquestionable. In place o...

Background: Individuals on the autism spectrum are often described as having atypical social interactions. Ideally, interactional synchrony helps any interaction flow smoothly with each individual responding verbally, non-verbally, and/or emotionally within a short timeframe. Differences in interactional synchrony may impact how individuals on the...

With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more as a product of data and algorithms. Thus, we conceive ourselves "in the image of our machines," and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the...

While linear time results from the measurement of physical events, the temporality of life is characterized by cyclical processes, which also manifest themselves in bodily experience. This applies for the periodicity of heartbeat, respiration, sleep–wake cycle, or circadian hormone secretion, among others. Cyclical repetitions are also found in the...

The advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are increasingly calling into question the distinction between the simulation and reality of the human person. On the one hand, they suggest a computeromorphic understanding of human intelligence, and on the other, an anthropomorphic view of AI systems. In other words: we increasingly view o...

According to transhumanists, the human being in its current shape is fundamentally imperfect. Consequently, they propagate possibilities of enhancing and reshaping one’s body, culminating in the idea of virtual immortality, i.e., transferring one’s mind as software onto more durable substrates (“mind uploading”). Such ideas are based on a blatant m...

From a neuro-constructivistic point of view, the brain creates an internal simulation of the external world which appears as the phenomenal world in consciousness. This view presupposes in particular that the subjective body and the organic or objective body belong to two fundamentally different worlds, the mental and the physical. The spatiality o...

Since its development around 1800, psychiatry has been moving between the poles of the sciences and the humanities, being directed toward subjective experience on the one hand and toward the neural substrate on the other hand. Today, this dualism seems to be overcome by a naturalism which identifies subjective experience with neural processes—accor...

Theories of personal identity in the tradition of John Locke emphasize the importance of psychological continuity and the abilities to think, to remember and to make rational choices as basic criteria for personhood. As a consequence, persons with severe dementia are threatened to lose the status of persons. Such concepts, however, are situated wit...

Digitalization and artificial intelligence hold the prospect of new procedures for psychiatry. Machine learning techniques combined with big data should enable algorithmized diagnostics, prediction and therapy that are superior to clinical observation and interaction in terms of accuracy and efficiency. This development converges with the search fo...

Author: Thomas Fuchs Italian Translation by F. Brencio in F. Brencio (a cura di/ed.), Dal corpo oggetto alla mente incarnata - From the object body to the embodied mind, in “InCircolo – Rivista di Filosofia e Culture”, 11, pp. 21-59 ISSN 2531-4092 http://www.incircolorivistafilosofica.it/la-circolarita-della-mente-incarnata/

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe disturbances in a subject’s sense of identity. Persons with BPD suffer from recurrent feelings of emptiness, a lack of self-feeling, and painful incoherence, especially regarding their own desires, how they see and feel about others, their life goals, or the roles to which they commit...

Menschen waren sich nie genug. Seit sie anfingen, sich von anderen Tieren zu unterscheiden, erfanden sie Werkzeuge und schließlich große Maschinen, um Naturgewalten zu bändigen, Ressourcen besser zu nutzen und das Leben komfortabler zu gestalten. Was man heute Enhancement nennt, setzt also nur eine uralte Tradition fort. Um den Anforderungen des Al...

Embodied and phenomenological approaches to neuropsychiatry have proven to be promising for assessing social cognition and its impairments. Second-person neuroscience has demonstrated that the dynamics of social interaction make a difference when it comes to how people understand each other. This article presents the Perceptual Crossing Experiment...

Leib, Raum, Zeit und Intersubjektivität gehören zu den zentralen Themen der Phänomenologie sowie der phänomenologischen Psychopathologie und werden im vorliegenden Band umfangreich dargestellt. Nach einer einleitenden Übersicht widmen sich vier Kapitel diesen Themen, sowohl in allgemeiner phänomenologischer Hinsicht als auch unter Berücksichtigung...

Leib, Raum, Zeit und Intersubjektivität gehören zu den zentralen Themen der Phänomenologie sowie der phänomenologischen Psychopathologie und werden im vorliegenden Band umfangreich dargestellt. Nach einer einleitenden Übersicht widmen sich vier Kapitel diesen Themen, sowohl in allgemeiner phänomenologischer Hinsicht als auch unter Berücksichtigung...

Leib, Raum, Zeit und Intersubjektivität gehören zu den zentralen Themen der Phänomenologie sowie der phänomenologischen Psychopathologie und werden im vorliegenden Band umfangreich dargestellt. Nach einer einleitenden Übersicht widmen sich vier Kapitel diesen Themen, sowohl in allgemeiner phänomenologischer Hinsicht als auch unter Berücksichtigung...

Leib, Raum, Zeit und Intersubjektivität gehören zu den zentralen Themen der Phänomenologie sowie der phänomenologischen Psychopathologie und werden im vorliegenden Band umfangreich dargestellt. Nach einer einleitenden Übersicht widmen sich vier Kapitel diesen Themen, sowohl in allgemeiner phänomenologischer Hinsicht als auch unter Berücksichtigung...

Aus den Debatten der Philosophie des Geistes und der Phänomenologie kaum wegzudenken, hat sich die begriffliche Erforschung des „Selbst“ hier eine Bedeutung erkämpft, deren Spuren in den psychopathologischen Klassifikationssystemen kaum wiederzufinden sind. Erst in jüngster Zeit werden Versuche unternommen, die durch diesen Begriff und seine philos...

Theories of personal identity in the tradition of John Locke and Derek Parfit emphasize the importance of psychological continuity and the abilities to think, to remember and to make rational choices as a basic criterion for personhood. As a consequence, persons with severe dementia are threatened to lose the status of persons. Such concepts, howev...

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Beitrags zu Grundlagen der psychiatrischen Anthropologie steht die spezifische Vulnerabilität der psychischen Organisation des Menschen. Diese wird anhand von zwei Leitfragen untersucht, die sich auf die Entgleisungsmöglichkeiten der psychischen Struktur und auf problematische und überfordernde Bedingungen der menschlichen Exi...

Der folgende Überblick entwirft zunächst ein verkörpertes Modell von Emotionen, das aktuelle Ergebnisse der Embodiment-Forschung zu integrieren erlaubt. Im zweiten Abschnitt werden die Zusammenhänge zwischen Emotionswahrnehmung, -regulation und Psychopathologie näher untersucht, im dritten Abschnitt Prinzipien und Techniken der verkörperten Emotion...

Bewusstsein im Computer ist eine Simulation, sagt Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Inhaber der Karl-Jaspers-Professur für Philosophische Grundlagen der Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie an der Universität Heidelberg, in der ersten Folge unseres Podcasts Selbstbewusste KI. Sein aktuelles Buch “Verteidigung des Menschen“ ist kürzlich bei suhrkamp erschienen....

From an embodied and enactive point of view, the mind–body problem has been reformulated as the relation between the lived or subject body on the one hand and the physiological or object body on the other (“body–body problem”). The aim of the paper is to explore the concept of circularity as a means of explaining the relation between the phenomenol...

Mit den Fortschritten der künstlichen Intelligenz, der Digitalisierung der Lebenswelt und der Reduzierung des Geistes auf neuronale Prozesse erscheint der Mensch immer mehr als ein Produkt aus Daten und Algorithmen: Wir begreifen uns selbst nach dem Bild unserer Maschinen, während wir umgekehrt unsere Maschinen und unsere Gehirne zu neuen Subjekten...

Neuroscience is becoming increasingly powerful, both theoretically and technically. There is no doubt that neuroscience has provided valuable information about the biological foundations of human behavior and reveals the mechanisms underlying its development in daily life. We are beings that make decisions based on our genes, hormones, and neurons....

The series ‘Health Research. Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ is published annually and focuses on topics relating to all aspects of health. Our aim is to take interdisciplinarity as an aspiration seriously and provide the latest findings on current issues from different disciplinary perspectives. This volume addresses the highly topical subject of...