ABSTRACT
Phenomenologists are concerned with the everyday world of human existence, with descriptions of states of being in relation to oneself and to others, such as anxiety, the anticipation of death, love, desire and sexuality. This chapter describes the uniqueness and complexities of individuals' lived experiences of time. It also describes the variability of an individual’s conscious and unconscious temporal experiences: they shift importance and are articulated in a multiplicity of ways, verbally and non-verbally. As a philosophical method, phenomenology was founded by the German philosopher, Husserl, a student of Franz Brentano’s in Vienna, who also taught Sigmund Freud. The chapter focuses on one individual’s lived experience of psychosis in its temporal aspects. It considers both the limitations of E. Minkowski’s account and also the more extensive contribution of F. Roustang with his emphasis on the time of the parents as the foreclosed “other” in psychotic experience.
