Editor's Introduction

Abstract

What does it mean to construct a perspective in the psi sciences? By what means does the psychic become observable — both for the researcher, in the form of data, descriptions, and classifications, and for the subject herself, in the form of a habitual language of self-description? What techniques of observation and self-observation, what criteria of truth, and what institutional procedures render the psyche visible — and thereby constitute it as an object of knowledge and therapeutic intervention?

The thematic issue «Constructing a Perspective: Epistemology of the Psi Sciences» was conceived precisely as an inquiry into these mechanisms: how knowledge of the psychic emerges, becomes stabilized, is transmitted, contested, and — most importantly — how it reshapes its own objects. Our concern is not with the competition among schools, nor with the history of the search for the «best method», but with the organization of regimes of observation and regimes of discourse that determine what counts as a fact and what as an error, what is recognized as care and what as violence; where the boundary between description and evaluation is drawn; and how evidentiality, authority, and responsibility are configured within the spaces of the therapeutic office, the laboratory, and the clinic.