1 DELUSION: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH 1 Louis A. Sass & Elizabeth Pienkos INTRODUCTION The phenomenological approach to delusions focuses on delusion as a phenomenon, on its subjective or lived dimension. The phenomenologist is interested, first and foremost, in understanding what it is like to have a delusion, or, more accurately, in understanding the variety of ways in which one might experience delusions and the delusional world. i The term ‘phenomenology’ derives from the Greek phainomenon, which means ‘that which shows itself in itself, the manifest’ (‘das Offenbare’) and also from Logos, which means to ‘let something be seen’ but also ‘to bind together’ or ‘gather up’ (Heidegger 1996, p.24f; Moran 2000, p.229). The aim of phenomenological psychopathology is, one might say, to render manifest the manifest. It is to reveal to us (to the psychologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, etc.) how things appear to the subject or patient; and to do so in a way that clarifies, to the extent possible, the (sometimes paradoxical) coherence of the patient’s world and life by showing the interdependence of different aspects and phases of her experience and expression. Phenomenology has often been characterized as ‘merely descriptive,’ but that is not truly the case: it offers something like ‘explanation’ in several senses of that ambiguous term. Through clarifying the nature of the manifest, phenomenology seeks to reveal two things: 1, the complementarity of different aspects of the patient’s experience and expression (this means showing implicatory relationships of a synchronic kind—the task of ‘static phenomenology’) and 1 Paper published as: Sass, L. & Pienkos, E. (2013). Delusions: The phenomenological approach. In W. Fulford, M. Davies, G. Graham, J. Sadler & G. Stanghellini (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Psychiatry, pp. 632-657. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.