Rhythms of intuition. Methodological reflections in phenomenological psychology

This paper discusses how different concepts of rhythm apply to phenomenological psychological research. We suggest that viewing phenomenological research in psychology as rhythmic not just enables us to notice how the research procedure implies certain shifts within in a series of temporally structured movements of repetition and change; it also enables us to deepen our understanding of the manner in which the researcher engages with the studied phenomenon through intuition. In other words, we argue that rhythm is fundamental to the method of how we understand “the things themselves.”

Rhythm Politics in a Changing Brazil: A Study of the Musical Mobilization of Voters by Bolsonaro and Haddad in the 2018 Election

This article investigates the role of music in presidential election campaigns and political movements inspired by theoretical arguments in Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, John Dewey ́s pragmatist rethinking of aesthetics and existing scholarship on the politics of music. Specifically, it explores how musical rhythms and melodies enable new forms of political awareness, participation, and critique in an increasingly polarized Brazil through an ethnomusicological exploration of how left-wing and right-wing movements used music to disseminate politics during the 2018 election that culminated in the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Three lessons can be learned. First, in Brazil, music breathes life, energy, and affective engagement into politics—sung arguments and joyful rhythms enrich public events and street demonstrations in complex and dynamic ways. Second, music is used by right-wing and left-wing movements in unique ways. For Bolsonaro supporters and right-wing movements, jingles, produced as part of larger election campaigns, were disseminated through massive sound cars in the heart of São Paulo while demonstrators sang the national anthem and waved Brazilian flags. In contrast, leftist musical politics appears to be more spontaneous and bohemian. Third, music has the ability to both humanize and popularize bolsonarismo movements that threaten human rights and the rights of ethnic minorities, among others, in contemporary Brazil. To contest bolsonarismo, Trumpism, and other forms of extreme right-wing populism, we cannot close our ears and listen only to grooves of resistance and songs of freedom performed by leftists. We must also listen to the music of the right.

Experiencing Change: Rhythms of Everyday Life Between Continuities and Disruptions

Change is a constant condition of everyday life that we experience and transition through while often maintaining a sense of stability and continuity. But inevitably we come across disruptive changes that call into question the meanings we take for granted and thereby rupture life as we know it. How do those changes affect our rhythms of living? How do we make meaning of the changes and subsequently act upon them? How do individual, social, and environmental changes reciprocally influence one another? These are the guiding questions of this paper. The questions are explored by means of a sociocultural psychological approach to ruptures in the life-course coupled with Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. It is argued that those questions can be investigated within five interrelated analytical domains; time, space, the body, social others, and symbolic resources. Rather than primarily emphasizing adaptation to change, the analytical framework’s key focus is meaning-making, looking at how we integrate or resist new rhythms in our lives.

Phenomenology of Rhythm: The Role of Rhythm in Written Language

Based on existential-phenomenological perspectives from Merleau-Ponty and Løgstrup, we examine the significance of rhythm for written language skills. Rhythm is both omnipresent and a difficult phenomenon to explore. Methodologically, the article presents phenomenological descriptions and exemplifications, not least a case study of a secondary school student with written language difficulties. Our intention is to illuminate connections between rhythmic perspectives in movement, speech, working memory and language as prerequisites for the acquisition of written language skills. We conclude that rhythm is an essential aspect of our bodily being, and based on the work of Merleau-Ponty, we are able to bring to light relationships between body, rhythm, and written language skills in ways that would not be possible from a natural scientific point of view. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty's analytical approach and the hermeneutic phenomenology of Ricoeur, we will combine an understanding perspective with both human scientific and natural scientific explanations, into a holistic interpretation. The article thus draws empirically on qualitative descriptions of rhythmic phenomena, and theoretically on perspectives from philosophy of language, developmental psychology and neuropsychology, but they are all interpreted in the light of existential-phenomenological ontology.

The Pitch as Meaning-directing Activity: Implications for Students and Education When Fast Pace and a Striving for Novelty Set the Scene

The elevator pitch is part of a global tendency toward homogenization of entrepreneurial content in educational programs (Fletcher, 2018), and this article shows how the pitch is naturalized as a new language because it must be decoded in order to pass an innovation course for health students at a Danish University College. A core communicative component of the pitch is speed. Using pragmatism, the article shows how the pitch guides the meaning making of students and how the compressed time element reduces the space for reflection. Thus, the educational rhythm is set by values from the pitch and innovation. Further, the article problematizes how the pitching situation separates the pitched end product both from reflections on possible consequences of new solutions and from the dynamic forces that actually created the pitch.

Mothering Death: A Psychosocial Interpretation of Breast Cancer Biography

In this article I take as my point of departure a puzzle presented by a woman who had an apparently ‘bizarre’ reaction to a breast cancer diagnosis. In the clinic, she had exclaimed: “I would rather die than lose the breast!”. My aim is to unpack layers in this woman’s embodied and enculturated experience, with a view towards developing a psychosocial interpretation of breast cancer biography. The single case on which the present study is based, was extracted from a larger longitudinal data set which allowed me to follow ‘Ella’s’ transition from diagnosis to survivorship. I relied on five sources of data to unfold the case: two participant-generated texts (expressive writing and a Breast Biography), two interviews, and my own field notes. The two texts that Ella wrote provided a participant-led frame for depth-hermeneutic group interpretation sessions, the first of which, synergistically, produced a scenic voicing of latent content in the sub-text of Ella’s expressive writing: the fantasy of mothering death. This subsequently became a lead for my further interpretation of the case, and for methodological reflections on the value of shared thinking in qualitative data interpretation. Crucially, and with some bearing on the current healthcare context, this interpretive study sheds light on what goes on beneath the surface of an apparently ‘irrational’ and ‘recalcitrant’ patient, evidenced by Ella’s entry into what I call a ‘vortex of suffering’. Findings point towards her suffering as an expression of a psychosocial reality, against the backdrop of hope and ideals contained within a psychosocial imaginary that revolves around biomedical cure and reparation. Keywords: breast cancer biography; the breast; psychosocial studies; depth-hermeneutics; vortex of suffering; psychosocial reality

Negotiating languages of suffering in northern Uganda

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda, I argue that psychiatric notions of suffering brought into the region by humanitarian intervention programs interact with local concepts of suffering (based in spirit-idioms) in two ways: In some cases, the diagnostic notion of PTSD and its vernacular counterpart “trauma” psychologize the local cosmology, transforming local spirit concepts from social or moral categories, to psychological ones. In other cases, psychiatric discourses hinged around “trauma” become spiritualized or enchanted, where the concept of trauma becomes usurped by and part of local cosmology. In an attempt to understand these processes, I suggest understanding concepts of suffering through their use in social practice and based on pragmatist epistemology. If viewed as a pragmatist concepts, I argue, it becomes possible to understand the social life of concepts of suffering (such as “trauma”) when they become globalized and negotiated in new contexts and social practices.

A Virtue Ethical Approach to Interpretation of the Suffering Other

In this article my aim is to take up a thread from an article by Svend Brinkmann, wherein he is anxious to show that mental suffering cannot exclusively be explained within the narrow vocabulary of medical diagnosis systems, but can, an should be, be articulated through a large range of ‘interpretive vocabularies’ (Brinkmann 2014). In line with Brinkmann’s emphasis on the large range of possible interpretive vocabularies, I will engage the moral philosopher Iris Murdoch to show how the exploration of different possible interpretations of a particular client’s situation is in fact an ethical task, which requires the practitioner’s personal development of virtue in terms of selfless, loving attention as the precondition for a realistic interpretation of the client’s situation.