Altered consciousness is a common symptom across many psychological disorders, yet clinical psychology and psychiatry lack a clear framework for recognizing, understanding, and treating these disturbances. This paper reviews how the DSM-5 and ICD-10 currently address consciousness, summarizes psychological and theoretical perspectives, and offers a practical clinical definition of consciousness linked to various diagnoses. Using Jean-Paul Sartre's distinctions among states, functions, qualities, and structure, it provides a conceptual framework to refine diagnostics and guide therapeutic possibilities in clinical practice.
This paper examines conceptual issues in the neuroscientific study of empathy, focusing on Decety and Jackson's 2004 work. It argues that while Decety and Jackson resist reducing empathy to brain processes and emphasize its developmental, interactional, and human aspects, their method of decomposing empathy into interacting components conflicts with defining empathy as an interactional phenomenon. Decomposition places empathy inside the brain, whereas recent philosophy requires a definition encompassing both the empathizer and the target. The paper also considers whether professionals' knowledge of social neuroscience matters for clinical and legal practices, concluding that Decety and Jackson's approach helps overcome reductionistic and mentalistic interpretations of empathy.