Emotions and Personhood Exploring Fragility - Making Sense of Vulnerability

How does a person experience emotions? What is the relationship between the experiential and biological dimensions of emotions? How do emotions figure in a person's relation to the world and to other people? How do emotions feature in human vulnerability to mental illness? Do they play a significant role in the fragile balance between mental health and illness? If emotions are in fact significant, how are they relevant for treatment? Emotions and personhood are important notions within the field of mental health care. What they are, and how they are related though, is less evident. This book provides a framework for understanding this relationship. The authors argue for an account of emotions and personhood that attempts to understand human emotions from the combined approach of philosophy and psychopathology, taking its models particularly from hermeneutical phenomenology and from dialectical psychopathology. Within the book, the authors develop a basic set of concepts for understanding what emotional experience means for a human person, with the assumption that human emotional experience is fragile - a fact which entails vulnerability to mental disturbance. Drawing on research from psychiatry, psychopathology, philosophy, and neuroscience, the book will be valuable for both students and researchers in these disciplines, and more broadly, within the field of mental health.

Introduction
Troubled Selfhood
1. Subjectivity and Naturalism
2. A Hermeneutics of 'I am'
3. Body and Personhood
Fragile Personhood
4. Abundance of Feelings and Conceptual Clarity
5. Ambivalent Personhood
6. Emotions and Personhood
7. The Feeling Brain - Biology and Existence
Mindscapes
8. Schizophrenia as a Disorder of Mood
9. Borderland - the Life-World of Borderline Persons
10. Emotions, Vulnerability, and Care