What kind of humanizing effect could phenomenology have on psychiatry?

One of central problems of the philosophy of psychiatry today is the crisis of psychiatric institutions that manifests in the decline of services provided for patients’, but also in the deterioration of practitioners’ work conditions. The term “dehumanization” is often used to describe this situation: we hear about the lack of human approach in the way the person is treated, about the impossibility to have human relationships between physicians and their patients, about inhuman work environment of those who are involved in a psychiatric field. In this perspective, the call to re-humanize the psychiatry seems only natural for specialists of the psychiatric domain and for university researchers. Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is often evoked in this context as one of the best ways to approach this issue. On the one hand, levinassian ethic seems to be particularly pertinent to discuss the atrophy of the relationships between people that take part in the psychiatric institutions, and on the other hand, it seems to be able to guide the elaboration of medical ethics. In this presentation I would like to clarify to what extent the use of the levinassian philosophy is relevant to the analysis of the dehumanization of the clinical relationship. I will argue that the potential of levinassian phenomenology for psychiatry has not yet been fully explored. The results of this study will indicate a way to address a more general issue concerning the pertinence of phenomenological approach in the psychiatric field. I believe that a new look on the use of the levinassian perspective can make us reconsider the benefits of phenomenological psychiatry