I grew up in a madhouse, deeply in love with the madwoman—my mother—who managed the house with both care and passion. Our madness was defined by silence, the absence of words, and bursts of intense pain. Although we never received a clear diagnosis, every now and then, the end of some inner dialogue—often introduced by the Italian word "dunque" (then)—would break the silence, offering us a fleeting insight into her reality, and consequently, our own.

In this paper I will focus on the intersubjective experience of care drawing on Husserl's critique of psychologism. Using parts of my mother’s journal I will focus on Husserl’s Prolegomena (Husserl, 2001) to show how both logical psychologism and psychological logicism are forms of reductionism that taint our ability to open up in our relationships of care. In particular, these forms of reductionism tend to simplify the difficult quest for sense, reducing the complexity of sense either to psychological skills or to logical symbols. If we oversimplify our ability to make sense, too many people in our world would cease to make sense. Accordingly, either we would apply the category of ‘otherness’ (Bhugra et al. 2023) on too many individuals until none is left to be intersubjectively part of our world; or we would reduce to nonsense what everyone has to say.

Susi Ferrarello is Associate Professor at California State University, East Bay. Among her books are the upcoming Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood (Routledge, 2025), Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality (Bloomsbury 2015), Phenomenology of Sex, Love and Intimacy (Routledge 2018), Human Emotions and the Origin of Bioethics (Routledge 2021), and The Ethics of Love (Routledge 2022). She writes for Psychology Today and works also as a philosophical counselor.

This event is part of our ongoing series "Responding to Witnessing Mental Illness Through Doing Philosophy" which is co-organised with Zsuzsanna Chappell. Please find more details of this series here: https://www.philosophyandmedicine.org/colloquium-series