As self-interpreting beings, we continuously strive to make a logos out of pathos.
However, in psychopathological conditions, abnormal experiences often exceed the horizon of such hermeneutic self-understanding leading to critical transformations of the individual life-world.
This understanding of mental illness – in which contingent clinical manifestations reflect underlying transformations of the personal way of being-in-the-world – condenses the core epistemic framework for of phenomenological therapy.
The aim of such a therapy is to re-establish the dialectic of vulnerability, thereby allowing the suffering person to rearticulate the structure of her/his life-world becoming who she or he really is.

Phenomenological Psychotherapy (PP) is sensitive to the constitutional fragility of human person and thus conceives mental illness as the result of a normative vulnerability intrinsic to being a human subject. However, while acknowledging such subjective fragility, PP emphasizes our responsibility for being the person that we are. To become the person that we are, we must become aware of what we care about, since being a person is to take upon oneself the responsibility involved in what one cares about.