First-Episode Psychosis and Centrality in the Work of Psychiatrist Henri Grivois: A Dialog with Phenomenological Psychopathology

Abstract

The article traces the hypotheses of the contemporary French psychiatrist Henri Grivois, concerning what he calls nascent psychosis. In a perspective close to descriptive phenomenology, Grivois tries to identify the alteration of subjective experience specific to the first moments of a psychosis. He thus describes the experiences of concernment and centrality as consisting in a disruption of the tacit mechanisms of mimesis and interindividual attunement. Using the common points between Grivois’s aim and that of the phenomenological approach, the article puts these two conceptions of first-episode psychosis into dialog, questioning in particular the prereflexive register of experience. The notion of centrality questions the conditions of the constitution of intersubjectivity: it places the question of the bodily and gestural incarnation that founds the relationship to the other at the center of our understanding of psychosis. Grivois’s hypotheses and the phenomenology of psychoses together contribute to the questioning of the therapeutic methods employed in the early stages of treatment. Centrality, in particular, questions the limits of verbal descriptions of psychotic experiences and invites us to think about methods that are based more on the anchoring and bodily attunement of the patient and the therapist.