"Philosophy and Psychiatry from the Standpoint of the Event" Prof. Vincenzo Di Nicola Contribution to the Plenary Symposium at the XIV Romanian Conference of Psychiatry Bucharest, Romania - 15 July 2021 "Why Psychiatry Needs - and Cannot Avoid - Philosophy" This symposium convokes a distinguished international panel of psychiatrists and philosophers to discuss the proposition that psychiatry needs – and cannot avoid – philosophy. My presentation is predicated on the intimate relationship between all things related to psyche (psychiatry, psychology & psychoanalysis) and philosophy; its inevitability – hence, the allusion to Freud’s “return of the repressed”; and its necessity – thus offering philosophy a foundation for psychiatry Accordingly, I decided to be bold and use this symposium to announce a call for a psychiatry of the event, based on the event in philosophy (an ontology). My title makes allusion to Franz Brentano's promised project, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) with an ironic nod to J.B. Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34094.64321

1. PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHIATRY
FROM THE STANDPOINT
OF THE EVENT
Prof. Vincenzo Di Nicola
Plenary Symposium on
Psychiatry and Philosophy
XIV Romanian Conference of Psychiatry
Romanian Association of
Psychiatry & Psychotherapy
Bucharest, Romania – July 2021

2. “THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED”
WHY PSYCHIATRY NEEDS –
AND CANNOT AVOID –
PHILOSOPHY
Chair: Prof. Vincenzo Di Nicola
Plenary Symposium on
Psychiatry and Philosophy
XIV Romanian Conference of Psychiatry
Romanian Association of
Psychiatry & Psychotherapy
Bucharest, Romania – July 2021

3. Introduction
This symposium convokes a distinguished
international panel of psychiatrists and
philosophers to discuss the proposition that
psychiatry needs – and cannot avoid –
philosophy.

4. Plenary Symposium Panel
Doina Cozman, Conference President
Vincenzo Di Nicola, Chair
Presenters:
Mircea Dumitru
Bill (KWM) Fulford
Virgil Ciomoș
Drozdstoj Stoyanov
Vincenzo Di Nicola
Discussant:
Eliot Sorel

5. Epigraph
If anyone thinks he can exclude philosophy and
leave it aside as useless he will be eventually
defeated by it in some obscure form or other.
– Karl Jaspers,
General Psychopathology (1913)

6. Prof. Vincenzo Di Nicola
MPhil, MD, PhD, FRCPC, DLFAPA, FCPA, LD MA Sc
Professor of Psychiatry
Université de Montréal & The George Washington University
Teaching Faculty
Harvard Medical School
Honorary Chair & Professor of Social Psychiatry
Università Ambrosiana

7. Declaration of Interests
Professor of Psychiatry
• University of Montreal (academic salary)
• The George Washington University
• Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, HMS (stipend)
Offices
• AACAP, Diversity & Culture Committee
• APA, GMH Caucus, Assembly Rep, Assembly Awards Cmte.
• CASP, President; WASP, President-Elect (stipend)
• SSPC, Board Member
Publishing: Aeon/Psyche, Atropos, Durango,
Fordham, Oxford, Springer, WW Norton & Co.

8. PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHIATRY
FROM THE STANDPOINT
OF THE EVENT
Prof. Vincenzo Di Nicola
Plenary Symposium on
Psychiatry and Philosophy
XIV Romanian Conference of Psychiatry
Romanian Association of
Psychiatry & Psychotherapy
Bucharest, Romania – July 2021

9. Philosophy and Psychiatry
from the Standpoint of the Event
My presentation is predicated on the intimate
relationship between all things related to psyche
(psychiatry, psychology & psychoanalysis) and
philosophy;
its inevitability – hence, the allusion to Freud’s
“return of the repressed”; and
its necessity – thus offering philosophy a
foundation for psychiatry

10. Accordingly, I decided to be bold and use this
symposium to announce a call for a psychiatry
of the event, based on the event in philosophy
(an ontology).
My title makes allusion to Franz Brentano's
promised project, Psychology from an
Empirical Standpoint (1874) with an ironic nod
to J.B. Watson’s Psychology from the
Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919).
Philosophy and Psychiatry
from the Standpoint of the Event

11. Existential crisis of psychiatry
(Di Nicola, 2020; Di Nicola & Stoyanov, 2021)
Psychiatry at a crossroads – of social sciences, the
humanities, and neuroscience
The emergent paradigm: Clinical neuroscience
Crisis of being vs. crisis of knowledge
Psychiatry’s three critical gaps
1. the lack of a consensual psychology
2. the lack of an organizing consensual model of psychiatry
3. the lack of a consensual theory of change (as opposed to
mere descriptions based on some privileged model)
Overview I

12. Three philosophical solutions
(Di Nicola, 2020; Di Nicola & Stoyanov, 2021)
“Pseudo-problems” (Wittgenstein, 1953)
“Weak thought” (Vattimo & Rovatti, 2012)
Being (ontology) & Event (Badiou, 2005)
Overview II

13. My work – as a child psychiatrist, as a psychotherapist
and as a philosopher – is divided in two
On the Threshold – waiting for something to happen
with children, with migrants and refugees –
liminal people on the cusp of change
The Event – living a life after it does
when migrants arrive, when children achieve a goal –
when the changes have occurred
Threshold/Event

14. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2007) has
written beautifully on the philosophy of infancy
Employing philosophical archaeology (Agamben, 2009)
to mine the resources of our Latin heritage (Agamben,
2001):
The Latins had a singular expression, vivere vitam, which was passed on to
modern romance languages as vivre sa vie, vivere la propria vita [live one’s
own life]. The full transitive force of the verb “vivere” has to be restored
here; a force, however that does not take on an object (this is the paradox!),
but, so to speak, has no object other than life itself. Life here is a possibility,
a potentiality that never exhausts itself in biographical facts and events,
since it has no object other than itself.
Philosophical Archaeology

15. Our work as therapists, like life, is a possibility that
never exhausts itself.
Agamben reminds us to live our own lives.
Waiting on the threshold teaches patience.
Arriving at our destination teaches us that life has no
other object than itself.
Like life, Evental Therapy enacts a transitive force that
has no object: it simply presents itself.
Vivere vitam

16. An Event arises from a rupture in our life-world
or situation that I call a predicament (Di Nicola,
1997, 2011)
The consequences of such a rupture create the
conditions for change (Di Nicola, 2012, 2018):
either we shut down (trauma)
or we open up and something new comes into our
lives (Event)
The Event

17. Out of rupture and predicament, two extremes
may occur – trauma and Event
This is the title and major finding of my doctoral
thesis (Di Nicola, 2012) with philosopher Alain
Badiou echoing his major work, Being and
Event (2005)
Trauma/Event

18. Two kinds of psychiatry, therapy, and ways of
living arise from that formulation …
Threshold Therapy – which describes my work
in cultural family therapy for the last 35 years –
deals with families in transition, on the
threshold, undergoing rapid cultural change,
dealing with trauma (Di Nicola, 1997, 2011)
Threshold Therapy

19. Evental Therapy guides people out of situations
of rupture, healing trauma when possible,
coping with it as best they can, and preparing
for the possibility of an event in their lives
(Di Nicola & Stoyanov, 2021)
Once an Event occurs, therapy helps them to
learn to live with the consequences.
Evental Therapy

20. An event is contingent – meaning it is unpredictable.
There is no destiny or fate – we have to give up the
notion that things were “meant to be”.
This makes life – and therapy – risky and vertiginous.
It gives up the illusion of control and sure outcomes –
but it admits the possibility of real change.
Contingency

21. The contingency – or randomness – of the Event also
implies that there is no predetermined, fixed outcome.
And there is no fixed notion of identity.
To use the metaphor of the voyage of the migrant –
We do not really know where we will land,
what we will make of our arrival, or
what we will become there.
Arrival here is the Event – by being faithful to the
Event, we become subjects to the Event.
Redefining the Subject

22. This means that the Event precedes the subject.
This is congruent with systemic theory,
relational psychology, and social psychiatry
which hold that the individual emerges from
family and social interactions, not the other way
around.
The Event Precedes the Subject

23. These are the three conditions of the Event and
for becoming a genuine subject:
to live the Event,
to name it and witness it, and
to be faithful to its truth.
Three Conditions of the Event

24. In contemporary societies, marked by velocity
and positivism – fast food and quick fixes,
tangible rewards and measurable outcomes –
true Events are as rare as genuine subjects.
Therapy cannot induce or bring about the
Event, it can only prepare us to recognize the
truth of the Event and integrate that truth into
our lives as its faithful subjects.
Philosophical Implications of the Event I

25. Evental Therapy and Evental Psychiatry are founded on
the crisis of being, of ontology
The ontology of the Event recasts the more than 100-
year-old tradition of phenomenology in philosophy and
psychiatry away from an intentional or subjective basis
to one based outside of conscious choice and
determinism
The Event dismisses all forms of determinism and
reductions of being to its components
Philosophical Implications of the Event II

26. Badiou holds that philosophy has conditions or truth
procedures and that philosophy cannot be sutured to
its conditions
For psychiatry, this means that the discipline must
remain its own master, not sutured or subjugated to its
sub-disciplines from 19th-century nosology to 20th-
psychoanalysis and biological therapies to 21st century
neuroscience
They are all valuable in their own way, but none of
them can define or dominate psychiatry
Philosophical Implications of the Event III

27. Ancient philosophy set out to define “the good life”
In radically redefining “the good life” as a faithful
subject of the Event, the Event enables persons to
become radically engaged in their lives
The qualities that emerge from the Event and Evental
Therapy and Psychiatry are resistant to the accelerated
society of the present
Philosophical Implications of the Event IV

28. Like the Latin maxim vivere vitam that has no
other object than itself,
Evental Therapy counsels patience and slow
thought.
Philosophical Implications of the Event V

29. Questions
&
Comments

30. References
Agamben G. (2007). Infancy and History: On the Destruction of
Experience. Trans. by L Heron. London, UK & New York, Verso.
Agamben G. (2009). Philosophical archaeology. In: The Signature
of All Things: On Method. Trans. by L D’Isanto with K Attell. New
York, Zone Books, pp. 81-111, 119-121.
Agamben G. For a philosophy of infancy, trans. by E Polizoes.
Public: Art, Culture, Ideas, Spring 2001; 21.
Badiou, A. (2005). Being and Event, trans. by Oliver Feltham.
London: Continuum.
Brentano, F. (1973). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (German original, 1874)

31. References
Di Nicola, V. (1997). A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families,
and Therapy. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co.
Di Nicola, V. (2011). Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational
Practices for the Coming Community. New York & Dresden:
Atropos Press.
Di Nicola V. (2012). Trauma and Event: A Philosophical
Archaeology. PhD dissertation in philosophy, psychiatry and
psychoanalysis. Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre
Studien – European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Valais,
Switzerland.

32. References
Di Nicola, V. (2018). Two trauma communities: A philosophical
archaeology of cultural and clinical trauma theories. In: PT
Capretto & E Boynton (Eds), Trauma and Transcendence: Limits
in Theory and Prospects in Thinking. New York: Fordham
University Press, pp. 17-52.
Di Nicola, V. (2020). Editorial—“Crisis? What crisis?” The crisis of
psychiatry is a crisis of being. Bulgarian Journal of Mental Health,
1(1): 4-10.
Di Nicola, V., and Stoyanov, D. (2021). Psychiatry in Crisis: At the
Crossroads of Social Science, The Humanities, and Neuroscience.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.

33. References
Vattimo, G. and Rovatti, P.A. (eds.) (2012). Weak Thought, trans.
and with an introduction by Carravetta, P. Albany, NY, State
University of New York Press.
Watson, J.B. (1919). Psychology from the Standpoint of a
Behaviorist. Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Co.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations, trans. by
G.E.M. Anscombe. London: MacMillan Publishing.