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Weltschmerz. Not always pure is the snow

I was eager to help. Now ghosts visit at night, memories haunt me. I’d like to go back. Ghosts come and visit because I am still committed to helping. They don’t want me to go back. It is a conflict upon values. Let me share what I’ve learnt. Experiencing obsessions and compulsions does not have primarily to do with washing or checking, nor with control or certainty, rather with values, acceptance, freedom. I wanna go back. Let me go back. It was November, it was cold, and the snow outside just claimed another victim. Berlin’s Winter can be harsh, especially if you have got no roof over your head. Until that very day, I had felt extremely helpless before homeless people. My friend had found an open-air soup kitchen and gently nudged me to give it a try, together. Under Berlin’s grey sky, there they were. Hundreds of hungry, miserable existences were there, queueing to have some food, perhaps some clothes, and most importantly, a dialogue with another human being. Indeed, any kind of in...
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Stuck on the Puzzle on YouTube

We are happy to share that our dialogues for the OCD project are finally online! Here our YouTube Channel which hosts the following interviews:   - Piers Benn, Having a good life Prof. Dr. Francesca Brencio in conversation with Prof. Dr. Piers Benn, about OCD, existential uncertainty and the possibility to have a good life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX8V7jxQzN4 - Miles Hentrup, Hegel can give us a key In this beautiful episode Miles recounts how he got to know that he had OCD. He shares his experience about the impact that OCD had in his personal relationship and explains how Hegel can help us to find a solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTDeLvoRl20&t=10s
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Stuck on the Puzzle on Spotify

We are on Spotify!  Check it out! Stuck on the Puzzle
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Anti-Curiosity Exercises, Plutarch, and Quitting Obsessions

 As someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and as someone who is really into trying the various exercises that philosophers like to prescribe sometimes, I always wonder how various philosophical practices would interact with my disorder. I gave myself a challenge for the year 2024: to commit to practicing one new philosophical exercise each month, and to write about it on my blog .   Because of the Stuck on the Puzzle project, I decided, for January 2024, to take on Plutarch’s anti-curiosity exercises, described in his essay On Curiosity [1]   Indeed, I was specifically interested in seeing if those exercises could help counteract OCD. Reflecting on my own OCD, I came to agree with Juliette Vazard’s assessment that this disorder must have something to do with a dysfunction of the mechanism that normally leads someone to pick out things worth inquiring into [2] .  She describes two linked affective mechanisms: one mechanism to assess if a proposition has stak...
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Who we are

Members of the research project are... Francesca Brencio is Associate Researcher at the Research Group "Filosofía Aplicada: Sujeto, Sufrimiento, Sociedad" at the University of Seville (Spain), and member of The Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice at the S. Catherine College at the University of Oxford (UK). She leads the Pheno-Lab, A Theoretical Laboratory on Philosophy and Mental Health . She also works as a philosophical counselor. More info at: https://us.academia.edu/FrancescaBrencio https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francesca-Brencio Susi Ferrarello , is associate professor at California State University, East Bay. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris, a master’s in Human Rights and Political Science from the University of Bologna. Among her books, The Ethics of Love (Routledge, 2023), Human Emotions and the Origin of Bioethics (Routledge, 2021), Husserl's Ethics and Practical Intentionality (Bloomsbury, 2015). She writes for Psychol...
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Stuck on the puzzle. A philosophical inquiry on OCD

The idea   Stuck on the puzzle. A philosophical inquiry on OCD  aims to provide a philosophical understanding on experiences of compulsions, obsessions and intense uncertainty, commonly through the contribution of people experiencing such phenomena. These experiences are typically thought of as part of an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but you do not have to be officially diagnosed as such or identify with this label in order to talk to us.  We are a goup of philosophers interested in people’s experiences. Some of us, who are conceiving this project, do have OCD, and this is what motivates us to initiate a dialogue on this theme, bringing together philosophical resources, especially those coming from the field of phenomenology, and lived experiences.  We are planning to create a podcast featuring a dialogue with people who have, or have had, these experiences. We believe that this kind of conversations can reveal certain aspects that are useful for society to ...
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