Phénoménologie, expertise, méthode : comment les pratiquer avec douceur

Objectives

This article aims to show how the forensic psychiatric examination reconstructs, by progressing gently from the facts and the intimate history of a life, a clinical practice which is specific to it.

Method

We set aside the theories that prevail in the medical and judicial domains in order to make the clinical phenomena appear as they occur in the subject's natural experience of the world. We practice this form of reduction beginning with the encounter with the patient, and relate it in this article by choosing a literary style (37 numbered paragraphs made up of a number of equal words), that is faithful to its subjective progression, made of gentleness, formalizations, and cuts showing the objective points of attachment to the solidity of the clinical.

Results

The clinical facts occur in the patient's lived world and in the common world, each one thought of as a reality of daily life and a reality of work, and which are co-constructed by institutions and culture. Our results are presented as clinical variations on the theme of the forensic psychiatric examination, highlighting the importance of the subject's inner history as well as the importance of his or her culture.

Discussion

This work shows how, by passing from the oral to the written form and then returning to the oral form at the time of the hearing, the expert witness does not so much describe the facts as he produces them, by placing them in direct relation with subjective experience: that of the perpetrator, that of the victim, and that of the expert himself. As a collection of stories, no fact, clinical or judicial, has any meaning in isolation. It only becomes worthwhile through the relationship that it makes present from various angles and points of view, characteristic of the plural realities that make up the co-construction of the expertise. The phenomenological method, by progressing gently, allows the facts to appear as they can make sense to each of the protagonists. A common horizon of values can then emerge from the discussion and the successive passages from oral to written form, which sheds light on the possibilities of discernment, choice, and responsibility that structure the missions entrusted to the expert witness.

Conclusion

Phenomenology brings to forensic psychiatry a rigorous method of progression on the philosophical level as well as on the clinical level. It can thus contributes to the progression of the judicial truth without draping the reality of the clinical facts with any cerebral mythology or any preconceived theory applied from the outside to the facts, to the subject's own experience, and to what links them.