Depression as a Disorder of Valueception (Wertnehmungsstörung) Outlining Model Specifications and Comparisons in the Framework of Axiological Psychopathology

With the onset of the new millennium, phenomenological approaches started to redefine their outlook on the field of psychopathology. The main thrust of the “second wave” of phenomenological psychopathology can be summarized through the motto “adequate description, precise explication.” In pursuit of this motto, I turn to the field of psychopathology of emotions, in particular regarding experiences of something as mattering, significant or relevant. Homing in on depression as a paradigmatic case study, I argue for the utility in establishing a concept of disorders of valueception for explaining psychopathological alterations in such experiences of mattering. To this end, I identify several key contributions for understanding disordered manners of apprehending values and subsume them under the umbrella term of axiological psychopathology. The goal of this article is to demonstrate how axiology (the study of values), provides the meta-discursive matrix which allows to specify and compare different models of depression. I demonstrate this for the cases of Ratcliffe’s (2010) existential feelings, Schlimme’s (2013) depressive habituality, Schneider’s (1920) endogenous, reactive and complex forms of depression, Cutting’s (2018) interpretation of psychotic depression and Cusinato’s (2018b) unmotivated intentional arc. Also, I propose an integrated model of depression based on the axioms of material value-ethics. Relying on disorders of valueception as a common conceptual foundation, an axiologically enriched, phenomenological psychopathology possesses proof of concept that it is able to adequately describe the sufferer’s lived experience and to precisely explicate its pathological alterations in its models.