Phenomenology of Functional Neurological Disorder

Kevin Aho is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University, USA. He has published widely in the areas of existentialism, applied hermeneutics and phenomenology, and phenomenological psychopathology. He is the author of One Beat More: Existentialism and the Gift of Mortality (2022), Existentialism: An Introduction (2014; 2nd ed. 2020), Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology (2019), Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body (2009), and Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Illness, and Disease, with James Aho (2008). He is also editor of Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness (2018) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism (2024).

• Acknowledgements Introduction What is Functional Neurological Disorder A Phenomenological Approach to FND Chapter Overview Chapter 1. From Hysteria to FND 1.1 Hysteria: A Brief History 1.2 Hysteria and Neurasthenia 1.3 FND and the DSM 1.4 The Crisis of Neuroscience and the Role of Phenomenology Chapter 2. The Search for a Diagnosis 2.1 The Uncanny and the Collapse of Understanding 2.2 The Problem of Certainty 2.3 Critical Phenomenology and the Harms of Invalidation 2.4 The Problem of Psychogenesis Chapter 3. Body, Shame, and Guilt 3.1 The Phenomenology of Shame 3.2 Clinical Shame 3.3 Shame and Guilt 3.4 Shame and Women’s Bodies Chapter 4. Time, Space, and Intersubjectivity 4.1 The Loss of Ecstatic Time 4.2 Crip Time, Intersectionality, and the Achievement Society 4.3 The Collapse of Space 4.3 Loss of the With-World Chapter 5. Chaos Narratives 5.1 Narrative Identity 5.2 Narrative Chaos 5.3 The Grief of Chaos 5.4 The Problem of the Sick Role 5.5 Healing as Possibilizing Chapter 6. Empathy, Acceptance, and the Limits of Neuroscience 6.1 The Meaning of Being a Person 6.2 The Worldly Locus of FND 6.3 Empathy and the Un-Understandable 6.4 The Problem of Acceptance 6.5 Authenticity and Existential Healing Chapter 7. Conclusion 7.1 The Loss of Medical Power 7.2 The Art of Healing Afterword References Index

“Aho gives voice to the suffering endured by patients diagnosed with FND, an uncanny medical condition with unknown causes situated at the border between neurology and psychiatry. He tracks the history of a diagnosis marked by shame and stigma which profoundly affects the possibilities of sharing and belonging to the world of others. Uniquely positioned as a leading scholar in the field of philosophy of medicine, Aho manages to combine his personal experiences with a phenomenological analysis of the specific symptoms and the changed identity they give rise to. He very convincingly argues that contemporary medicine needs to abandon neurocentrism and opt for a more radical empathy in the care of patients with medically unexplained disorders.”Fredrik Svenaeus, Södertörn University, Sweden