Medical phenomenology describes the illness experience while providing an alternative
to the reductionist biomedical discourse. Phenomenologically oriented critical theories
focus on the experiences of structural paradoxes manifesting as social suffering.
While both approaches elaborate different patterns of suffering, so far, their parallelisms
and interactions have not been adequately analyzed. This task is all the more important
because illness experience is never only about the disabled body or the distressed
mind, it is also inseparable from a distorted intersubjectivity; and vice versa, untreated
social suffering also has the potential of turning into illness. After overviewing
various experiences characterizing illness and those disrupted intersubjectivities,
which can produce a homologous phenomenological pattern, four idealtypical patterns
are analyzed. The parallel occurrence of illness and social suffering represents extreme
existential disembedding; illness without social suffering represents a chance for
countering the bodily disembedding by intersubjective re-embedding; social suffering
without illness is a constellation, wherein the chance of medicalizing structural
distortions is high; the lack of illness and social suffering represents a carefree,
yet unreflective potential. Differentiating between these patterns opens new horizons
for medical phenomenology and critical theories as well, both on the theoretical and
the practical level.
