The method of pathological phenomenology

the soma-sema articulation in first-person qualitative research

Abstract

This paper analyzes the central question of the mode of access to pathological phenomena. Following Róbson Ramos dos Reis in his research on childhood cancer, I pursue and deepen what he calls “pathological phenomenology” through Allan Køster. This type of phenomenology, as such, is indicative of the methodological modality in which a pathology is analyzed by focusing on the first-person narrative. The initial question is the following: is the felt pathology transparent to any first-person narrative? This issue begins with Køster's tripartite analysis: narrative, pre-narrative, and non-narrative. The present work is configured, above all, from the study of the non-narrative phase, which seeks to be understood under non-narrative but meaningful parameters. In this sense, the studies of Erwin Straus and Hans-Georg Gadamer are encompassed. From the former, significant but non-narrative esthesiological studies are taken; from the latter, the notion of text as a metaphor for the somatic is addressed, insofar as it resists any sequential narrative ordering. By delineating the somatic from the semantic, the aim is not to renounce the narrative but to open the interpretive field of first-person experience to other possible interpretations.