Emotions and Personhood: Exploring Fragility - Making Sense Of Vulnerability

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.