In my talk, I examine how the perception of temporal processes may motivate or even justify diagnostic identifications. My research focuses on the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition in which diagnostic reasoning relies heavily on a temporal understanding; an understanding which links a past experience with the meaning of present symptoms.
To clarify the function and structure of temporal perception, I offer a phenomenological reconstruction of the diagnostic situation. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, I introduce a bottom-up approach to diagnostic judgment, showing how assumptions about causality, simultaneity, and the temporality of the living body are grounded in embodied experience.