IHSE MEETING

AGENDA

(9:00 - 10:00)
Michael Saraga, MD, PhD
With a little help from a friend and a few philosophers

Dr. Saraga will discuss a few authors and concepts that have helped him as a researcher on clinical practice as a situated, lived experience; as an educator trying to reflect, and help trainees reflect, on the nature of transmission; and as a clinician in complex, constraining institutional environment. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics helped him make sense of medicine as a practice. He then turned to Sartre’s notion of situation, Gadamer’s view that wisdom and being-wise are inextricably linked, and Heidegger’s solicitude, three concepts that have been useful in the analysis of the interview material he gathered for his PhD.

Michael Saraga, MD, PHD, is psychiatrist-psychotherapist and senior lecturer at Lausanne University, Switzerland. He is head physician of inpatient care in the Service of General Psychiatry. His interests include group therapy, psychodrama, psychoanalysis, psychopathology, as well as the relevance of phenomenology and social sciences for medicine. He is co-director of a Bachelor 1 module dedicated to the role of humanities and social sciences in medicine.

(10:00 - 11:00)
Hubert Wykretowicz, PhD
What medicine can expect from a theoretical philosophy (phenomenology) ?

Theoretical philosophy is commonly said to be useless when it comes to practice. It seems that the best it has to offer is some kind moral advice, as it happens in ethical committees. However, reflecting on 10 years of experience with psychiatrists in the Psychiatric Department of the University Hospital of Lausanne (CHUV, Switzerland), it is proposed that this picture is somewhat flawed. Although philosophy may not fully resolve clinical issues, it allows practitioners to step back in ways that may sometimes reveal itself fruitful.

Hubert Wykretowicz, PhD is scientific associate in the Department of Psychiatry and lecturer at the biology and medicine faculty, and author of La sentinelle silencieuse, recherches sur l’incarnation de l’esprit et perspectives cliniques (trad: the silent sentinel, investigations regarding the embodiment of mind and clinical insights). Dr. Wykretowicz works with psychiatrists to build up a phenomenological psychiatry that understands mental disorders as a specific access to reality instead of a cognitive deficiency. In that regard he is interested in how patients come to (or fail to) have a bodily grip on the world, how they perceive and inhabit space and time, as well as the function of background beliefs and capabilities in illness.