Alienation and the Sciences of Mind: Understanding Schizophrenia Without Cognitivist Theory (original) (raw)
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Schizophrenia and the epistemology of self-knowledge
European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2010
Extant philosophical accounts of schizophrenic alien thought neglect three clinically signifi cant features of the phenomenon. First, not only thoughts, but also impulses and feelings, are experienced as alien. Second, only a select array of thoughts, impulses, and feelings are experienced as alien. ird, empathy with experiences of alienation is possible. I provide an account of disownership that does justice to these features by drawing on recent work on delusions and selfknowledge. e key idea is that disownership occurs when there is a failure of rational control over one's mind. is produces a clash between the deliverances of introspection and practical enquiry as ways of knowing one's mind. is explanation places disownership on a continuum with more common aspects of our psychological life, such as addiction, akrasia, obsessional thinking, and immoral, selfi sh or shameful thoughts. I conclude by addressing objections, and exploring the relevance of my account to questions in the philosophy of psychiatry concerning the validity of our current taxonomy of symptoms, and the nature of psychiatric classifi cation
Phenomenology, Schizophrenia, and the Varieties of Understanding
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2022
This is a commentary on Humpston, C. S. (2022). “Isolated by Oneself: Ontologically Impossible Experiences in Schizophrenia.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 29(1), 5–15. It is published with an additional commentary by H. Green and Humpston’s response.
The inside/outside distinction and the issue of boundaries, 2004
Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate an inability to distinguish internal from external sources of some experiences. Although there are numerous models, the causes and neural substrates are largely unknown. In schizophrenia, the commonsensical overlapping oppositions of internal/external, self/other, active/passive, mind/body, voluntary/involuntary become disentangled. Due to the loss of common sense, the imprecise coincidence of these oppositions inner and self, outer and other, mind and body lose their obviousness to the patient. Once the nexus of oppositions is unraveled, the patient tries to recover order by keeping the oppositions clear and separate in delusional interpretations of reality. The patient counters with delusional schemes that artificially keep these oppositions from merging. However, this web of proximate and overlapping oppositions lost to the patient not only inform the way we describe our everyday experience but also implicitly guide our conceptual models in psychology and neuroscience. Their source is a resilient but also protective common sense. Phenomenological method brackets the oppositions of common sense to study the otherwise concealed structures of consciousness. However, when applied to schizophrenia as a disorder of consciousness, phenomenology is burdened by controversy between two approaches: the Apollonian and Dionysian. Both traditions propose that the loss of common sense (in which the paradoxes and contradictions implicit to everyday experience are "overlooked" (von Weizsaecker)) is core to schizophrenia. Experience no longer rests on what is assumed to be probable (Blankenburg), but only proceeds in staccato, what must be, or delusional certainty. The Apollonian approach (Minkowski, Sass, Cutting) claims that the destruction of common sense in schizophrenia comes from above, melting under the scrutiny of an intact but too intense "hyperreflection." The Dionysian approach (Binswanger, Blankenburg, von Weizsaecker) attributes the erosion of common sense, coming from below, to a disruption of pre-attentive, automatic processing. The patient attempts to piece together experience by means of delusions in terms of the remaining fragments. However, both traditions have not been directly studied experimentally. The Apollonian model is hard
Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self
Topoi, 2020
A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external (i.e., beyond-the-brain) resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue — along with others in phenomenological psychopathology — that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude by considering how this scaffolded framework indicates the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment.
The core gestalt of schizophrenia
The recent debate in World Psychiatry on prototypes versus operational criteria (1) invites a prototypical reassessment of the clinical-phenomenological presentation of schizophrenia, especially in the light of recent developments in phenomenological psychopathology (2).
Theory & Psychology, 2012
This work presents affinities existing between the phenomenological view of schizophrenia and recent cognitive research on this disorder. We postulate that the core abnormality in schizophrenia is a particular kind of disturbance of the sense of self, which has two main aspects, an enhanced sense of awareness or hyperreflexivity, and diminished self-affection. Noticeable parallels are shown between "hyperreflexivity" and some cognitive models and research that concentrate on attentional processes in schizophrenia patients. It is also argued that "diminished self-affection" may be related to certain factors recently dealt with in cognitive research, such as "beliefs about superstition and responsibility related to one's own thoughts" and "dissociation." Furthermore, certain points which, in our opinion, could be of mutual enrichment to both viewpoints are briefly analyzed. Finally, several limitations and problems that such mutual sharing may have are also described, and some possible lines of future research are suggested.
ABSTRACT: The present paper clarifies key issues in phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology (especially of schizophrenia) through a critique of a recent article that addresses these topics. Topics include: 1, Phenomenology’s role in clarifying issues not amenable to purely empirical methods. 2, The relationship between a phenomenological approach (focusing on the subjective life of the patient) and empirical science, including neuroscience. 3, The nature of self-experience, especially in its pre-reflective form (“ipseity”—involving “operative intentionality”), and its possible disturbance in schizophrenia (“hyperreflexivity” and “diminished self-affection”). 4, The relationship between self disturbance in schizophrenia and disorders of both temporality and (what Husserl termed) “passive syntheses.” 5, The role of intentional or quasi-volitional processes in the perceptual (and other) disorders in schizophrenia. 6, The nature and diversity of phenomenology’s potential contribution to the enterprise of “explanation.” 7, The meaning of several concepts: “hermeneutic” or “existential” approach; phenomenological “reflection”; “negative symptoms.”
poor insight' into illness. We propose that poor insight into schizophrenia is not simply a problem of insufficient selfreflection due to psychological defenses or impaired metacognition, but rather that it is intrinsically expressive of the severity and nature of self-disorders. The instabilities of the first-person perspective throw the patient into a different, often quasisolipsistic, ontological-existential framework. We argue that interventions seeking to optimize the patients' compliance might prove more efficient if they take the alterations of the patients' ontological-existential framework into account.
The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation