Open-mindedness and phenomenological psychopathology: an intellectual virtue account of phenomenology and three educational recommendations

In his account of phenomenological psychopathology, Karl Jaspers advocates for the central role of subjective experience, something which he maintains cannot be accessed through intellectual effort, but through “empathic understanding” alone. In contradistinction to Jaspers’ account, I propose that phenomenology, as a process of inquiry and investigation, is fundamentally epistemological. Accordingly, I offer an intellectual virtue characterization of phenomenological psychopathology, using open-mindedness to illustrate the close conceptual links between the phenomenological endeavor and the intellectual virtues. By introducing the intellectual virtue lexicon into the phenomenological psychopathology discourse, I then offer three preliminary recommendations for the training and education of phenomenological clinicians. Centering the educational recommendations on the psychiatric interview, I suggest that good questioning, listening, and reflecting necessarily require cultivation for intellectually virtuous phenomenological inquiry.