The Double Meaning of Money

How does monetization affect interpersonal relationships? Drawing on social phenomenology, I argue that an answer must account for money’s symbolic dualism: On the one hand, as Zelizer has shown, money is differentially earmarked according to the interpersonal relationships it flows through. On the other hand, in everyday life, people tend to associate money with cold impersonality. Money’s dual association with both the interpersonal and the impersonal imbues the relationships it flows through with a sense of risk, which I call “the risk of lost meanings.” Analyzing the implications of this sense of risk, I argue that it turns trust into a relational preoccupation and constrains intersubjective experience. The risk of lost meanings may motivate risk-avoidance strategies, but these strategies are largely counterproductive. Shedding new light on a long-standing debate in the sociology of money, I discuss the implications of this argument for analyses of monetary developments and local currencies.

An Anthropological Journey to the Field of Disability: Teaching and Research by a Disabled Anthropologist in Greece

This article will discuss the relationship between anthropology and disability based on my fieldwork at a high school catering to special educational needs in Greece. More specifically, it will present the negotiating terms of the disabled anthropologist/teacher, who is conducting fieldwork inside and around the school area, as an example of autobiographical ethnography. I will explain the kind of perception and the degree of the identity that is the disabled person both as teacher and ethnographic researcher. These are two fields that ‘bother’ the disabled anthropologist/teacher and at the same time they create the condition for self-reflexivity on the nature of anthropology as well as teaching. Incidents that illustrate tensions, arguments, and collaboration with the informants (colleagues, students, parents, education officials, academics) during the participant observation, set up the template for the anthropological undertaking as well as the teaching procedure. This article also critically presents the events following the fieldwork when the anthropologist moves workplace by leaving the high school catering to special educational needs, where he taught and conducted the fieldwork, to teach at a general high school. This transition provides us with additional ethnographic data regarding the relationship between special education and general education by considering how students at the general high school then reacted to my fieldwork when I shared it as part of my social science teaching. This journey illustrates and explains why disability exists at the limit of the intersubjective experience inside the Greek educational system.

Virtuosity, Obviously

This chapter employs a phenomenological framework to argue that virtuosity—often understood as individual musical excellence—is an intersubjective phenomenon that centers on skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Rather than locating virtuosity solely in a performer’s body, a piece’s demands, or a listener’s opinions, the author argues that it arises within the dynamic relationships—what Maurice Merleau-Ponty would call the “intentional threads”—that connect audiences, performers, and musical sound. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, and apperception, the author utilizes Ravi Shankar’s early reception in the United States as a case study in how audiences come to experience musical performances as virtuosic, despite their lack of background knowledge or musical understanding. A phenomenological approach to virtuosity reframes the issue not as one of objective measure or subjective opinion, but of intersubjective experience and value.

Psychedelic Communitas: Intersubjective Experience During Psychedelic Group Sessions Predicts Enduring Changes in Psychological Wellbeing and Social Connectedness

Background: Recent years have seen a resurgence of research on the potential of psychedelic substances to treat addictive and mood disorders. Historically and contemporarily, psychedelic studies have emphasized the importance of contextual elements ('set and setting') in modulating acute drug effects, and ultimately, influencing long-term outcomes. Nevertheless, current small-scale clinical and laboratory studies have tended to bypass a ubiquitous contextual feature of naturalistic psychedelic use: its social dimension. This study introduces and psychometrically validates an adapted Communitas Scale, assessing acute relational experiences of perceived togetherness and shared humanity, in order to investigate psychosocial mechanisms pertinent to psychedelic ceremonies and retreats.Methods: In this observational, web-based survey study, participants (N = 886) were measured across five successive time-points: 2 weeks before, hours before, and the day after a psychedelic ceremony; as well as the day after, and 4 weeks after leaving the ceremony location. Demographics, psychological traits and state variables were assessed pre-ceremony, in addition to changes in psychological wellbeing and social connectedness from before to after the retreat, as primary outcomes. Using correlational and multiple regression (path) analyses, predictive relationships between psychosocial 'set and setting' variables, communitas, and long-term outcomes were explored.Results: The adapted Communitas Scale demonstrated substantial internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.92) and construct validity in comparison with validated measures of intra-subjective (visual, mystical, challenging experiences questionnaires) and inter-subjective (perceived emotional synchrony, identity fusion) experiences. Furthermore, communitas during ceremony was significantly correlated with increases in psychological wellbeing (r = 0.22), social connectedness (r = 0.25), and other salient mental health outcomes. Path analyses revealed that the effect of ceremony-communitas on long-term outcomes was fully mediated by communitas experienced in reference to the retreat overall, and that the extent of personal sharing or ‘self-disclosure’ contributed to this process. A positive relationship between participants and facilitators, and the perceived impact of emotional support, facilitated the emergence of communitas.Conclusion: Highlighting the importance of intersubjective experience, rapport, and emotional support for long-term outcomes of psychedelic use, this first quantitative examination of psychosocial factors in guided psychedelic settings is a significant step toward evidence-based benefit-maximization guidelines for collective psychedelic use.

HEIDELBERG MATURATION: phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis

This article attempts to historically reconstruct the phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis in order to establish a new framework of understanding psychoanalytic theory and practice, given the need for a new phenomenological justification of psychoanalysis as a special intersubjective experience of the analyst-analysand interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of phenomenologically oriented psy- chotherapies emerged within Western psychiatry. All of them were more or less influenced or exist in polemics with psychoanalytic teaching and relied primarily on phenomenology in its broadest sense. First of all, we should mention such eminent psychiatrists as Eugene Minkowski, who created the original project of phenomenological existential psychopathology, and also Ludwig Binswanger with his existential, or Dasein-analytical anthropology. All these attempts in one way or another correspond to the general attitude of phenomenology to the critique of psychologism, and ultimately to naturalism of any kind. Therefore, their critique of psychoanalysis is primarily destructive, and psychoanalysis itself serves as one of the distinct examples of naturalistic reductionism of the highest type. These all leads to the rejection of psychoanalytic theory and practice as scientific, that is, one that is based on the Newtonian and Cartesian mechanistic conception of nature, and therefore makes any anthropology impossible. That is why all the mentioned phenomenological projects of psychotherapy at one time or another positioned themselves as projects of philosophical anthropology in a therapeutic perspective. The latest attempts at the phenomenological discovery of psychoanalysis can be seen as the rehabilitation of Kronfeld’s guidelines for the phenomenological justification of psychoanalytic experience.

Praecox-Gefühl in Classical and Modern Researches

Background: The introduction of modern classifications of mental disorders has caused a number of significant changes in the diagnostic process. Recently, both domestic and foreign authors began to pay more attention to the analysis of the “weaknesses” of the operational approach in the diagnosis of mental disorders. One of the “lacunae” that arose due to its distribution, which is hardly discussed in modern classifications, is the problems of the role of intersubjective experience in the doctor–patient relationship and the diagnostic process. The diagnostic technique based on the Praecox-Gefühl phenomenon is one of the most striking examples of the utility of such an experience.The aim was to present and discuss modern and classic Praecox-Gefühl studies in the context of analyzing the role of intersubjective experience in psychiatric diagnosis.Material and method: Modern and classic scientific publications were selected by using the keywords “Praecox-Gefühl” or “Praecox-feeling” in the databases of Web of Science, PubMed and in the other sources.Conclusion: the professional use of intersubjective experience arising in a doctor–patient relationship can be one of the diagnostic tools for identifying schizophrenia, including the early stages of the disease. Modern psychological studies indirectly confirm this statement by revealing an impairment of functions that provide interpersonal communication among patients with schizophrenia.

Configurations and Meanings of Environmental Knowledge: Transitions from the Subjective Experience of Students towards the Intersubjective Experience of Us

Environmental-related education has inherited the concepts of complexity and uncertainty from environmental science. However, these concepts still refer to the environment as an “object” that is separate from the knowing “subject,” and not as a phenomenon always inserted into a specific context. With the aim of contributing to generating contextualized environmental knowledge, this article explores the knowledge configuration itinerary regarding environmental issues that was developed by vulnerable students in public secondary schools located in peripheral municipalities of Santiago, Chile. The theoretical framework of complex thinking provides an epistemological opportunity to “read” and understand environmental knowledge within a web of co-determined spheres of social and community knowledge via the transition from “subjective understanding” to “intersubjective knowledge.” The knowledge configuration itinerary regarding the environment describes a transition from the sphere of the “self” towards an emplaced “us.” It was discussed that the incorporation of place in education is not only a pedagogical means, but also functions as an axis of meaning that highlights the multisemic nature of the environment in its different configurations. It was concluded that an educational project relevant to a global community must be founded upon those differences, as they provide opportunities for configuring knowledge as action and meaning.