1 The possibility of producing generalizable knowledge on the basis of what, in experience, only manifests itself in a “partial” or singular manner, is a crucial and complex epistemological question for the scientific study of the psyche. If, on the one hand, the philosophers and psychologists of the early 20^th century attracted attention to the individual manifestations of psychic life – “The problem of the 20^th century is individuality!”, wrote William Stern in his study Über Psychologie individueller Differenzen (p. V) [1] – on the other, the problem is to establish the method and the scientific authority for such a casuistic form of knowledge.

2 In the context of the Methodenstreit in psychology that arose in Germany at the end of the 19^th century, once Wilhelm Dilthey had insisted on the essentially “descriptive” and “comparative” character of psychology in view of the singularity of human experience, the question was one of knowing what kind of knowledge it produces, with what degree – and especially what kind – of objectivity. This question became even more pressing at the beginning of the following century, when psychology was called upon by a part of clinical psychopathology, principally inspired by the emerging field of psychoanalysis, that had started to reassess the positivist approach of academic psychiatric knowledge in order to identify a methodology that was capable of accounting for the historical and concrete character of the mentally ill individual. The critical debate over psychoanalysis was precisely why some of the more influential figures in European psychiatry felt the need to restructure their discipline via the contributions of a form of psychology that could analyze the subjective, singular experiences of psychic life in a scientific though not reductionist fashion. [2] One of the key moments of the debate was in 1913, when Karl Jaspers published a study titled “Kausale und ‘verständliche’ Zusammenhänge zwischen Schicksal und Psychose bei der Dementia praecox (Schizophrenie),” [3] which accused Freudian theory of reproducing the positivist approach of Leistungspsychologie, i.e. an objective knowledge of the act or “performance” based on physiology, an inductive kind of knowledge whose goal is to establish causal connections between psychic facts, aiming to set out laws for the purpose of constructing theories. Jaspers responded with a “genetic comprehension” based upon intuition, which dealt with what was immediately obvious and whose goal was not to lead psychiatrists to speculate on a general theory of the psychic realm, but rather to lead them to gradually explore the infinite variety of an individual psychic life, with all of its connections.

3 Jaspers’s theory was strongly contested by Binswanger who, in his “Critical Remarks,” [4] reproached his German colleague for limiting himself to considering laws in the field of psychology that were devised in the same way as those devised in the physical sciences. The main goal of “scientific” psychology, however, is not to imitate the approaches of those sciences, but to identify a method that is just as effective for “revealing” and “ordering” psychic facts and organizing them into a theory. [5] The adoption of Freudian methodology by clinical psychiatry [6] allowed the latter to abandon the abstract application of nosological categories and let itself be guided by “structural connections and principles” [7] that both governed the psychic realm and guided psychiatrists toward an understanding of humans as individuals, with their own life histories.

4 The question of knowledge about singularities has returned to the fore in recent decades, again in the context of reflections on the status or the scientific authority of psychoanalysis, notably through the work of John Forrester, a British historian and philosopher of science. For Forrester, psychoanalysis appears as the culmination of a much larger movement that began in the 20^th century in the areas of psychiatry, criminology and psychology, and that focused on outlining “a new way of telling a life.” This way combined two requirements that seem to contradict each other: accounting for “the specific and unique facts that make that person’s life their life; and at the same time, [attempting] to render that way of telling a life public, […] making it scientific.” [8] If, on the one hand, the singularity “makes a case” in the sense that it is puzzling, on the other, it can just as easily produce intelligible results when “clinical description relies upon a comparative stylization of the observed cases, which make the ideal types constructed in this way available for the identification of resemblances and differences between new cases.” [9] In other words, it is completely possible to generalize on the basis of analyzing single cases.

5 The epistemological debate on “thinking in cases” is far from settled today. [10] In particular, in the philosophy of psychiatry, the focus of discussions on knowledge of the singular has shifted from defining the scientific status of the fields of psychology to problematizing the methods of diagnosis and classification in psychopathology. This question has acquired new urgency following the 2013 publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). While casting doubt on the growing effort of psychiatric research to identify the quantifiable indicators of mental disorders and establish taxonomies founded on biological markers, many philosophers and psychiatrists have wondered about the process of generalization in the context of a diagnosis based upon clinical experience. From this standpoint, the identification of prototypes on the basis of the empirical comparison of cases, although it is founded on a criterion of “approximation” or “flexibility” in relation to the establishment of real nosological categories, [11] is invoked – according to the introduction that Geert Keil, Lara Keuck and Rico Hauswald wrote for their book Vagueness in Psychiatry – “either as an argument against essentialist definitions or ‘reifications’ of diseases […] or as being heuristically useful for reasoning about, and refining, diagnostic classifications.” [12]

6 Phenomenologists, in particular, have emphasized the relevance of the criterion of “typification,” not just to explain – as Josef Parnas and Dan Zahavi put it – “how abstractions are derived from everyday clinical experiences and encounters,” [13] but also to guide the psychiatrist in the process of diagnosing pathologies, [14] and to accompany clinico-pharmacological experimentation, neuroscience research and psychotherapy. [15] For Parnas and Zahavi, this system of classification is only meaningful and useful for clinicians who are able to identify and distinguish mental disorders in a more “fundamental” way: by means of a prereflexive apprehension that is already active in the process of typification. From this perspective, the psychiatrist should focus less on the principles that govern their knowledge on an abstract level and determine the scientific authority of their discipline, and more on the norms that guide their clinical experience in a “tacit,” [16] non-conceptual manner, on the level of the “lifeworld.”

7 I intend to examine and go into detail on the connection that the phenomenological current of psychopathology established with typological research in psychiatry, concentrating on the issues and desiderata that characterize some influential projects in the Germanlanguage tradition. I will limit myself to presenting just some examples among the various models so as to discover a methodological reference point. In particular, I will analyze the theoretical program developed by Binswanger in order to clarify the model of clinical knowledge that he puts forward.

Issues in the Typological Approach to Psychopathology

8 The typological approach was mainly developed in the early 20^th century, especially in the context of German-language psychopathology. In the wake of the “comparative psychology” outlined by Dilthey at the end of the 19^th century, the questions surrounding the scientific contribution that the typological approach could offer clinical psychiatry were already strongly present in the first edition of Jaspers’s Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913), [17] which stresses the role that the concept of the “ideal type” could play in the context of clinical knowledge guided by psychological “understanding.” And yet the real expansion of psychological studies that focused on establishing “types” and discussing the issues behind this method only took place in the 1920s. Of course, these theories and uses of the notions of “type” and “typology” differ greatly among themselves, and it would be both naive and wrong to try and juxtapose them. [18] However, there are some shared elements in the ideas of most of the authors who, at the time, wondered – in the words of the German psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld – about the possibility of “subordinating individual cases to a [defined] type,” on the basis of subsuming the forms of the individual under a shared trait, [19] without relying on a biological determinism limited to the physical phenotype. This means including the individual manifestations of psychic life among the objects of psychology while preserving psychology’s status as a “science”; in the field of psychopathology, it means finding an alternative to the traditional medical view, according to which the classification and diagnosis of illnesses are drawn inductively from the collection of individual pathognomonic symptoms. The typological approach, while limiting itself to identifying the “dispositions” of the mentally ill instead of compiling the list of their characteristics, lets the psychiatrist account for the psychopathological cases in which many subjects may be diagnosed with different illnesses even in the presence of identical symptoms.

9 Unlike the medico-clinical model – based upon the collection of symptoms, causal explanation and the standardization of results – the typological approach, as Carl Gustav Hempel and Paul Oppenheim noted in their 1936 study on the concept of the “psychological type,” [20] is geared toward grasping the continuous transitions and the graduated properties of things, in other words the qualities that are not exclusively inherent to a given object, but that are so to a greater or lesser degree. The type would thus replace concepts of class with concepts of order, which do not address a directly observed quality, but the fact that some objects may, in view of certain measures, be classified according to a relation that orders them. This relation, or this ordering principle, is the precise focus of the typological approach that many psychiatrists envisioned in the first half of the 20^th century. In this approach, the type is not the expression of a natural reality: it is an epistemic means, a sort of “descriptive image” whose purpose is to organize fluctuating phenomena such as psychic manifestations.

10 For Carl Jung, for example, the type defines an attitude or disposition that functions as a “decisive [principle] for the orientation of consciousness,” [21] an “a priori orientation” [22] that determines the form of thought, feeling, sensory experience and intuition. In the face of the infinite variability of the singular that is the focus of psychology and psychopathology, the researcher is limited to apprehending these typical regularities of behavior, which do not reveal the “nature” of the psychic realm, instead only offering glimpses of some of its mechanisms, dispositions or “a readiness […] to act or react in a certain way.” [23] Similarly, for Rorschach, the types of experience that are isolated during the “psychodiagnostic” process only appear as indicators of the disposition of certain functions (intelligence, affectivity, imagination), that define the conditions of possibility of the way in which the subject lives and relates to reality. The concept of “disposition” is also at the heart of William Stern’s “differential psychology,” in his treatise on Die differentielle Psychologie in ihren methodischen Grundlagen, [24] and Kurt Strunz’s text “On the Method of Typological Research in Psychology.” [25]

11 Whereas epistemological questions concerning the scientific status of the typological approach in psychology – and the theory of knowledge it is based on – play a central role in texts by philosophers, [26] psychiatrists concentrate more on the clinical issues behind this approach. As Jaspers noted in his Allgemeine Psychopathologie in 1913, the type is “a fictitious construct which in reality has fluid boundaries,” a construct whose goal is, in particular, to “give structure to a transient manifold” [27] in order to make it accessible to understanding. Similarly, Kronfeld, in his 1920 work on the essence of psychiatric knowledge, declared that the type must be “used as an instrument for considering the concept of individuality.” [28] In other words, the goal of the typological approach is to offer the psychiatrist-psychologist a diagnostic tool allowing them to respect the individuality of their subjects, without losing their way amid the infinite variability of the “connections of psychic life” – taking a cue from Jaspers – which manifest themselves in singular cases. Incidentally, William Stern, in his 1900 treatise on the psychology of individual differences, had already affirmed that the type served to find one’s bearings.

12 The type appears, then, as a secondary concept for which most of these psychiatrists do not claim universal scientific validity. In particular, Kurt Schneider, in his treatise on psychopathic personalities, [29] openly states that his theory of types is hardly a scientific definition, “but it is a practical one.” [30] As for the method through which information on types is gathered, all of the psychiatrists mentioned stress the “practical” character of the process of typification, including Jung, in his 1921 study, [31] and Kronfeld, in his study on “Der Verstandesmensch.” [32] Hermann Rorschach, in his Psychodiagnostics, presents these types as the result of observing the “characteristic […] variations” [33] of experience. Furthermore, Binswanger, in his 1923 “Bemerkungen” on Psychodiagnostics, defined Rorschach’s study as the expression of an “inspired understanding of mankind” or of the “human being” “gained through the experience of life.” [34]

13 This point could be problematic. Although it is true that this typological casuistry is based upon a kind of “practical wisdom” of the mental health specialist regarding human experience and knowledge about it, it is still hard to define this particular form of “sensibility” from a strictly theoretical point of view. The philosophers of the time therefore criticized these psychological approaches adopting a methodology based upon typification without, however, aiming to justify it systematically. Edmund Husserl, in his 1925 course on Phenomenological Psychology, thus reproached Wilhelm Dilthey for confining himself to “vague empirical generalizations,” [35] serving as a reference for Binswanger in establishing the “conceptual principles or logical foundations of psychology,” [36] and in rethinking the principles of clinical knowledge in psychiatry.

Typology, Psychology and Daseinsanalyse: Binswanger’s originality

14 Binswanger’s position regarding the typological approach evolved in response to the various authors with whom he contended. In his 1922 introduction to the problems of general psychology, he criticized Jaspers who had developed the concept of the “ideal type” in the section of his General Psychopathology devoted to “comprehensive psychology,” a subfield of psychology whose goal is to get an intuitive, immediately obvious idea of the origins of psychic states on the basis of the analysis of their connections. According to Jaspers, “such conviction is gained on the occasion of confronting human personality; it is not acquired inductively through repetition of experience.” [37] The frequency with which real cases appear that demonstrate these psychic connections would not, therefore, be the source of the (unreal) proof we have of their intelligibility. Binswanger cannot accept the ideal nature of Jaspers’s types, which he defines as “mere mental images, utopias, arbitrary constructions, empty abstractions.” [38] The doctrine of ideal types may be fruitful for history and sociology, as shown by Max Weber’s analyses. For psychology, on the other hand, it is an obstacle that should be eliminated, hence Binswanger’s project to steer psychology “towards reality.”

15 In a series of lectures published in 1928 on the history of the conceptions of dreams, [39] Binswanger thus affirmed that psychology must begin with the “observation, the breakdown and the collection of psychic phenomena in their experiential being, unfolding and connections.” [40] As he had stated in a 1926 article on “learning by experience, understanding and interpreting in psychoanalysis,” [41] “the scientific, systematic order and grouping of the material of experience” must follow the “themes or rational connections of meaning” [42] that the phenomena themselves demonstrate, and on the basis of which the psychologist may be able to formulate laws. These laws, however, are not abstract: they appear instead as the translation in systematic terms of the organization of psychic phenomena as they manifest themselves in experience. This is why Binswanger appreciated Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics, which explicitly presented itself as the development of a clinical method of dynamic classification based upon encounters with particular subjects, taking into account their individual expressions and differences. While being an empirical form of knowledge that is formalized in mathematical language, awareness of the “types of experience” identified by the test is not obtained by simply averaging the shared empirical traits that are identified in the responses of the subjects tested. As Binswanger emphasizes in his “Bemerkungen,” Rorschach took the concrete content of the interpretations provided by the subjects he observed and succeeded in deriving from that content the forms of experience transcending those interpretations and defining the structural laws of a subject’s psychic life. [43] The Erlebnistypen do not correspond to the sum of current, fixed qualities or traits: rather, they designate possibilities, capacities or conditions of being and acting that are not always or not yet actualized. “Knowledge of humans” does not consist in knowing “who” the person is and “what they live, but rather how they live.” [44] Rorschach managed to “understand where the others merely calculated,” [45] and therefore to show that “in the field of psychology, figures mean something completely different from what they mean in the field of physics.” [46] The intrinsic scientificity of psychology, its aim to be a knowledge of the “general,” would then consist in the capacity to “see” by means of experience, and to provide an overall view of the person via the results of the test, a view that is simultaneously an “understanding” of the person, because it grasps the general laws of the person on the basis of their individuality, by “letting itself be guided by the immanent laws of the material being explored.” [47] Rorschach was thus able to give his process of typification the “objectivity” lacking in ideal types. From this perspective, according to Binswanger, objectivity and singularity are inextricably linked, precisely through the psychologist’s ability to “see” the general in the form of the type, in the singular itself, as an expression of its immanent normativity.

16 This search for laws, or for the “connections and structural principles” that govern the organization and functioning of the psyche, is precisely what led the Swiss psychiatrist to turn to Husserl’s phenomenological approach and, later, to Heidegger’s existential analytic. While giving Jaspers credit for his contributions to making understanding a fundamental task of psychology, seen as “the study of humans and their works,” [48] Binswanger criticizes him for reducing psychology to “the concern of the single individual who fulfils it every time.” [49] The appeal that phenomenology has for him is precisely motivated by the fact of having recognized the need to base psychological knowledge on a scientific method. In Husserl’s eidetic method, Binswanger glimpsed the possibility of comprehending particular psychic phenomena on the basis of their “essence,” which he identified with their “norm” or “a priori structure.” This is a norm that, in phenomenological language, is immanent to the phenomenon and that, for the psychiatrist, coincides with a determinate configuration of psychic life, which may be recognized on the basis of the typical “connections of meaning” that govern behavior, thus making its various expressions possible a priori. Therefore, these connections of meaning do not exist independently with regard to a particular experience: on the contrary, they are its “ordering scheme” or its internal structure, in such a way that the explanation of the phenomenon is immanent to its very description. In fact, in the clinical context, the “a priori structures” that define the psychopathological configurations of experience cannot be theorized before their incarnation in a case, and yet it is these structures that are capable of guiding clinical treatment.

17 This approach was one that Binswanger would explore more fully in the early 1930s, on the basis of his reading of Being and Time. The needs of psychiatry, which were more “existential” and less theoretical, were better served by Heidegger’s book than by Husserl’s phenomenology. Through “existential analysis,” Binswanger thus reinterpreted the gnoseological investigation on the essence of phenomena by analyzing their “forms” or “styles” of existence, which characterize and summarize the modes of being of the individual in the world. As he states in his study “The Existential Analysis School of Thought,” [50] he takes the concept of Dasein and strips it of its purely ontological aims in order to use it as a “methodological clue” to penetrate the structural organization of pathological existence, understood in terms of a “world-design.” [51] For Binswanger, in this perspective, the patient’s particular biography becomes an opportunity to illustrate the transcendental organization that underlies a certain possibility of existence. The way that the Swiss psychiatrist characterizes the protagonists of his cases is particularly telling in this respect. In his clinical studies (particularly Le Cas Suzanne Urban), [52] the biographical details are appropriated for the purpose of revealing one or several existential possibilities of human destiny, in such a way that the historical transformation of a “particular form of existence” is taken as the “exemplary foundation” of one of the many possible modes of being in the world. This approach is what really determines the “phenomenological character” [53] of the analysis. The same approach is also particularly manifest in the essay on Henrik Ibsen that Binswanger published in 1949, [54] in which he compares Ibsen’s “clairvoyance” to Heidegger’s Anschauung. [55]

18 Through the dramatization of such “powers of being,” Binswanger was able to abandon the static understanding that hindered Jaspers’s typological venture. Of course, we may wonder if Binswanger succeeded in ascribing scientific value to an interpretive form of knowledge that focuses on the construction of a general field of knowledge on the basis of particular cases, analyzed in their exemplarity. There were numerous critiques of the school of Daseinsanalyse in the psychiatric literature, and it is open to question whether, for example, the theoretical basis used by Binswanger to justify his conception of the “types” of existence– as presented in clinical studies that resemble poetry – is enough to endow clinical knowledge with the “objectivity” that he claims for it. At least he was one of the first to systematically question the intrinsic rationality of clinical knowledge. Other typological approaches that were inspired by Daseinsanalyse – such as the theorization of the “typus melancholicus” by the German psychiatrist Hubertus Tellenbach in the 1960s – come very close to the attitude of psychiatrists in the early 20^th century who used the typological approach for purely diagnostic purposes.

19 More recently, the psychiatrists who have looked into the phenomenological method of typification in psychopathology are authors who refer both to the descriptive psychiatry of the early 20^th century and to the new research in the neurosciences. The abovementioned studies by Michael Schwartz and Osborne P. Wiggins see typification as the first step in the psychiatric clinic, and the work of Josef Parnas and Dan Zahavi concerns the pre-conceptual or prereflexive skills on which clinical knowledge may be based. This involves a perspective that opens the door for a radical questioning of the classic problems of “understanding” and “interpretation” in the area of psychopathology, and that sees clinical knowledge as a vital praxis that is destined to lead us to reconsider both rationality and epistemology, not only on the basis of the analysis of the principles that govern our knowledge on an abstract level, but especially of the vital norms that determine and organize our experience.