Today, the vast majority of mental health clinicians and researchers rely on diagnostic classification systems based on operational criteria. However, in their everyday practice, many clinicians also pay attention to their own feelings or intuitions about the patient. For an even greater number of clinicians, this process may occur inadvertently. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences have devoted attention to the reflective and pre-reflective aspects of the process of clinical knowing, and have provided theoretical accounts of the complex relationship between psychopathology, clinical reasoning, and the intersubjective field. Contributions to this topic have also been made by psychoanalysis and other psychotherapeutic approaches, which have focused on the role of the therapist’s feelings in the psychotherapeutic process. Indeed, scholars from various fields are increasingly stressing the importance of complementing the current emphasis on operational criteria as the gold standard of diagnosis with thoughtful attention to the subjective and intersubjective elements involved in a thorough psychopathological evaluation. This book aims at capturing the essence, implications and full potential of the clinician’s subjective experience in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. It presents an in-depth discussion of the role of the clinician’s subjective experience in the psychiatric evaluation, with the aim of illustrating the potential that the intersubjective experience offers to enhance our understanding of mental illness and psychopathology. It gathers contributions from several different disciplines, such as phenomenology, neuroscience, the cognitive sciences, and psychoanalysis. It also presents the development, validation and clinical application of a psychometric instrument that reliably investigates the clinician’s feelings, thoughts, and perceptions related to the clinical encounter in a measurable and quantifiable way. Such an instrument provides quantitative data on which clinicians themselves can reflect, and on which they can draw to learn about the ongoing relationship, so that the experience derived from the clinical encounter may inform the diagnostic and therapeutic process from the very initial phase. weiterlesen