Şerife Tekin, "Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narrative for a Humanist Science" (Routledge, 2025)
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What is Şerife Tekin’s new book about and why does it matter for psychiatry?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figtor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise and Sarah Tyson. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Sharife Tekken, Associate Professor of Philosophy at State University of New York, Upstate Medical University. Her new book, Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry, Centering Personal Narrative for a Humanist Science, is just out from Routledge. Psychiatry's quest for credibility as a scientific discipline led it to adopt a disorder label orientation in which mental conditions are categorized in terms of measurable behavioral criteria.
In her new book, Taeken offers an alternative framework that decenters the label and recenters the self. Taken argues that how patients try to make sense of their experiences through self-narratives, sometimes including self-diagnosed labels, is an essential source of information for tailoring treatment. She proposes the multitudinous self model for integrating the patient's self perspective back into the psychiatric picture and helping psychiatry itself embrace a more sophisticated notion of scientific objectivity. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Sharife Tekken. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Uh hi Kiri. Thanks for having me. Um, I'm super excited to be talking about your new book, Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry, Centering Personal Narrative for a Humanist Science.
Um, so before we get into the nitty-gritty of the book itself, uh, maybe you could tell us a bit about yourself, you know, how you became a philosopher and then how you came to, you know, have interests in this particular area of psych philosophy of psychiatry, um, and how this book came about.
Yeah, absolutely. Um, how did I become interested in philosophy? Uh in high school. So I grew up in Turkey and at the time, um, this is you know early nineteen nineties, uh, in secondary and high school, actually in at school we had classes, like separate classes, logic, philosophy, psychology, sociology. We had like these kind of Four different areas of classes that we were taking and as part of our regular education. Um, and I'm also coming from a family of uh educators, so we had a lot of different kinds of philosophy and psychology books at home. Um, so I was always drawn to kind of reading philosophy, and it was just kind of as a way for me to kind of, I guess, like exercise and understanding of myself.
I remember reading Nietzsche and Sartre as a teenager and I was totally uh kind of locked uh in kind of thinking of the world in a philosophical or you know existentialist lens. Um and in college I studied economics um because I I love math and I was very good at math and economics felt like the perfect kind of area of science where I could use math, but it also had a lot had a lot of like social components as you can imagine. But in college, uh at the Middle East Technical University in in Turkey, I had also the opportunity to study philosophy uh as a minor uh when I was doing my degree in economics. And somehow I got I found myself more um amazed by kind of philosophy as a way of uh thinking uh than kind of how I I guess
like saw myself as an economist working uh in a kind of practical context. So that's how I uh kind of you know moved uh to philosophy. I uh applied for uh various kind of you know master's programs abroad and uh I came to I went to look in Canada to do a master's philosophy and that's how it started.
Excellent. Um and uh I mean you work at a at a medical university as opposed to say a you know general uh university. Um so so clearly your your focus um has been in psychiatry or or at least medical, you know, biomedical, bioethics, that kind of thing for for a while. How did that become your uh your focus?
Yeah, um as a graduate student I was really interested in the conceptions of the self.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Şerife Tekin’s new book about and why does it matter for psychiatry?
0:01–7:53
2
How did Şerife Tekin’s personal journey lead her to focus on the self in psychiatry?
7:53–16:49
3
Why does Tekin argue that the ‘self’ is missing from contemporary psychiatric practice?
16:49–25:03
4
What is the Multitudinous Self (MuSe) model and how does it integrate patient narratives?
25:03–33:13
5
How can clinicians use the MuSe model to enrich diagnostic interviews?
33:13–40:29
6
What impact does social‑media‑driven self‑diagnosis have on mental‑health narratives?
40:29–49:42
7
How have psychiatrists and other clinicians responded to the MuSe framework?
49:42–57:14
8
What future projects is Tekin pursuing, especially regarding AI and the philosophy of the self?
57:14–1:03:05
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