The importance of philosophy in understanding madness is promoted, and the importance of the patient’s existential philosophical stance in creating and overcoming the psychotic experience is particularly emphasised. In contrast to the factographic approaches characteristic of the empirical knowledge of the relevant special sciences, the spiritual meta-instance of selfovercoming is clarified by developing the thesis of the irreducibility and irreplaceability of human self-consciousness in both the deterioration and improvement of mental health. The meaning of the right attitude towards transcendence is (...) explained, which implies the awareness of the limited knowledge of absolute reality, but not the loss of hope in its sanative manifestations. The main criteria for inadequate self-awareness of madness are the lack of a harmonised autobiographical narrative and incompatibility with the transcendent and universal order of values. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is an examination of the practical dimension of contemporary philosophical culture, both in relation to the idea of wisdom in traditional philosophy and in relation to psychoanalytical practice. In the first part of the paper, we determine what philosophical culture is, primarily by emphasizing the differences between that culture and the scientific-technological culture. In the second part of the paper, we show that such a philosophical culture has fallen into a crisis. In the third part (...) of paper, we offer a way out of that crisis, in the form of psychoanalysis, which criticizes the primacy that philosophical culture accords to consciousness, logic, diachronic and linear ways of thinking. In the fourth and last part of the paper, we present the shortcomings of this psychoanalytical model. As a solution, we offer a new model of philosophical culture, created by the synthesis of philosophy, psychoanalysis, but also other discipline of human thought, which has similarities with Nietzsche?s anticipation of Gay Science, as well as with Jasper?s idea of transcendence. (shrink)