Phenomenology, Speech and Belonging: A Workshop Report

This post by Lucienne Spencer reports on the proceedings of a phenomenology workshop held at the University of Bristol.

Some of the workshop speakers. From the left: Luciennce, Josh, Jae, and Ellie

On 26 November, the University of Bristol hosted the EPIC event entitled ‘Phenomenology, Speech and Belonging’, chaired by Havi Carel. These three key themes brought together by Anthony Fernandez (University of Southern Denmark), Nga Chun Josh Law (University of Bristol), Ellie Byrne (University of Nottingham), Jae Sul (University of West England), and Lucienne Spencer – that’s me! – (University of Oxford),

The event was kicked off with a talk by keynote speaker Fernandez. He considered how phenomenology can be operationalised as a rigorous research method through Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research (PGQR), pioneered by Fernandez and his team. After bringing to light some of the benefits and drawbacks of more traditional phenomenological research methods, Fernandez cleared the way for PGQR as an innovative alternative that fills the gaps in the current research methodology. A distinctive feature of PGQR is the frontloading of phenomenological concepts within the study design, which will allow researchers to better draw out the ‘existentials’ (e.g. affectivity, body memory, etc.) of the participant’s being-in-the-world. At present, Fernandez and team are developing a tightly focused interview guide for PGQR, and will later reflect on distinct methods of phenomenological analysis. I imagine that those who, like myself, are attempting to shove phenomenological concepts into ill-fitting qualitative frameworks are relieved that this work is being done! These new and alternative methods of phenomenological research feel much needed, and I look forward to seeing what Fernandez and team develop in this space.

The following talks were connected by an implicit ambition to apply phenomenological methodologies and concepts to better understand the barriers to intersubjective cohesion experienced by three vulnerable groups: those in psychiatric therapy, older people and second-generation migrants.

I was up next, with a talk that mined Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech expression to consider how certain kinds of speech expression can lead to intersubjective attunement in the therapeutic space (‘speaking speech’) and how other forms of speech expression can inhibit this attunement (‘spoken speech’). Merleau-Ponty describes how speaking speechcan facilitate intercorporeality between the Self and Other, where we inhabit one another by taking up each other’s speech. In contrast, Spoken speech can be compared to what Ian James Kidd refers to as ‘vices of banality’, whereby concepts in illness are not properly treated with the reverence or complexity they deserve. For example, a person may be fobbed off with a ‘look on the bright side’. when discussing their depression. I suggest that Spoken speech both inhibits meaning-making in the therapeutic space and inhibits the vital intersubjective attunement between patient and healthcare professional. While my quest for the audience to do the hard work for me in considering the implications for speaking and spoken speech in AI went unanswered (I’ll have to get round to doing this myself…), I faced interesting suggestions to consider the ‘empty speech’ discussed in psychoanalysis and Heidegger’s idle talk.

Next, Law presented a chapter from his PhD thesis on Beauvoir’s existentialist phenomenology of old age. Law aims to understand how Beauvoir challenges conceptions of old age as a pathological decline of a transcendent being-in-the-world. Moreover, Law observed that Beauvoir’s account disrupts the established dichotomy between transparency in health and opacity in illness, positioning old age in an ambiguous space between the two. This results in a paradoxical state of what Beauvoir calls ‘normal abnormality’. As such, Law suggests that in Beauvoir’s depiction of old age, there is an oscillation between a visible and invisible body. Law’s talk also examined what Beauvoir perceives as a shift in the experience of temporality: rather than an open expanse of possibilities, one’s future feels limited, curtailing ambitions for future projects. This prompted Law to consider the role of the habitual patterns of embodiment in Beauvoir’s account, and how one can achieve a form of flourishing, rather than stagnation, within habitual patterns – what Beauvoir calls ‘the poetry of habit’. Law’s talk provoked discussion of ageism and how it can pathologise everyday acts, such as hobbies and habitual routines.

The final talk of the day was by Byrne and Sul, who discussed the phenomenology of belonging and psychosis in second-generation migrants. Their talk began by exploring evidence that the risk of psychosis is sustained (and in some cases even increased) in second-generation migrants compared to first-generation migrants. Byrne and Sul asked why this is the case and suggested that we may find the answer in a phenomenological account of familiarity and belonging. Drawing on the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, Byrne and Sul examined how the migrant’s identity as ‘The Stranger’ persists even to second generations, despite the fact that they ought to have a familiarity and sense of belonging to the place in which they are born and grow up. They considered a number of phenomenological explanations for this disruption, including a breakdown in ‘mutual reciprocity’ and ‘epistemic familiarity’. This occurs when there are difficulties in a second-generation migrant’s capacity to recognise the behaviours, gestures, and expressions of others, and in turn a lack of recognition and uptake from others. A key idea that arose from this talk was that of second-generation migrants being caught between orienting (at least) two worlds, two cultural patterns, in which they are expected to display fluency.

Author bio

Lucienne Spencer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Mental Health Ethics within the NEUROSEC Team in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. She works under the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Social Emotions’ project. She also leads the NeurOx Young People’s Advisory Group. Her research primarily focuses on phenomenology, epistemic injustice and the philosophy of psychiatry.

Self-diagnosis and its implications in child and adolescent psychiatry

This week's post by Christophe Gauld, Laelia Benoit, and Floriane Brunet considers how the increasing prevalence of self-diagnosis influences the relationship between clinicians and young patients.

In recent years, many adolescents have begun arriving at psychiatric consultations not to seek a diagnosis but to confirm one they already believe they have. They describe themselves as, for instance, autistic or having ADHD, after reading descriptions (online) that resonate with their experience. This phenomenon of self-diagnosis happily challenges established hierarchies of knowledge in psychiatry, especially in child and adolescent care.  

But it also raises an important question, which we explored in depth in a recent article: how should clinicians and young patients (re)position themselves in relation to one another, especially when differences in age and status necessarily influence the clinical relationship?

Let us recall that in most clinical contexts, diagnostic authority is concentrated in professional hands. And since psychiatric categories do not rely on biomarkers, the formulation of a diagnosis remain closely connected with social and moral judgments of harm. This interpretive dependence of diagnosis on clinicians creates an asymmetric epistemic space, in which the clinician’s account can prevail over the patient’s own lived experience and interpretation.

In children and adolescents, this imbalance could combine with childism, a form of discrimination that assumes the child’s voice is unreliable, immature or irrelevant. Like ageism, which marginalizes people because of age, childism operates on the same generational axis by devaluing children through assumptions of dependency and immaturity. It refers to a system of attitudes and practices that naturalise adult superiority, treating children as incomplete or incapable of rational understanding. Its specificity is in the transformation of developmental difference into a moral and social justification for inequality.

Childism operates structurally, embedded in institutional norms and clinical routines that reinforce adult authority and marginalise children’s voices. It frames adult perspectives as normative, establishing “standards of reason,” credibility and emotional coherence that children are expected to follow. In clinical practice, it appears to arise “naturally” from age differences. This naturalistic assumption biases how clinicians listen to patients whose discourse differs from their own. And this is compounded by the fact that childism intersects with other forms of discrimination (e.g., gender, disability, class, etc.), producing cumulative disadvantages that shape how young people are heard and understood.

To see how this might play out in clinical practice, consider an example. When, for instance, an adolescent comes to a clinician declaring “I think I’m autistic”, they do not simply misuse medical language. They reclaim interpretative power over their own experience. They demand recognition as knowers. These acts are epistemically and politically significant. They reveal how power and knowledge are interdependent in psychiatry: thus, although some self-diagnoses may rely on incomplete or misleading information, they also open a space for rethinking how clinical knowledge is shared and validated.

Due to their distinct conceptual histories and to the primary object of application of childism – i.e., childhood – epistemic injustice and childism are conceptually related and mutually reinforcing, operating across interconnected levels. Epistemic injustice designates a harm to someone’s capacity as a knower, which becomes visible within communicative and epistemic exchanges where authority and credibility are unequally allocated, and which contributes to broader structural patterns. 

Childism, in parallel, refers to the institutional norms, laws and professional practices that naturalise adult superiority, and which are enacted and reproduced within everyday clinical interactions. In this sense, childism both shapes and is shaped by interpersonal clinical practices, and epistemic injustice reflects how these normative assumptions are lived and negotiated in concrete encounters in child and adolescent psychiatry. Together, these overlapping dynamics help explain how self-diagnosis makes visible the ways credibility, authority and recognition are distributed in clinical care.

Bios

Christophe Gauld is a French adolescent psychiatrist with a PhD in philosophy of psychiatry (Université Paris 1 Sorbonne).

Laelia Benoit, MD, PhD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and researcher affiliated with Yale University and Inserm. Her work focuses on qualitative and mixed-methods research, child mental health, and the social and systemic determinants of psychiatric care..

Floriane Brunet is a French child psychiatrist and holds a university diploma in philosophy of psychiatry.