Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (Chapter 6. Intentionality and Interpersonal Experience) (original) (raw)

2017, Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World. Chapter 6. Intentionality and Interpersonal Experience

Here is Chapter 6 of my book *Real Hallucinations*, which was published by MIT Press in September 2017. This is the longest and most important chapter, where all of the various strands of argument are brought together. Chapter Introduction: This chapter further explores how interpersonal relations shape and regulate the structure of experience. In so doing, it develops the position introduced in Chapter 5, according to which perceptual experience incorporates a distinctive kind of anticipation-fulfilment dynamic, upon which the modal structure of intentionality depends. My central claims are as follows: (a) disturbances of global anticipatory style are inextricable from changes in how one experiences and relates to other people; (b) these disturbances can lessen differences between the characteristic temporal profiles of intentional states (where a temporal profile is the anticipation-fulfilment pattern that is typical of one or another type of intentional state); and (c) temporal profiles are central to, but not exhaustive of, the sense of being in a given type of intentional state. The chapter begins by addressing how perceptual experience is interpersonally regulated, after which it considers the implications of this for our understanding of belief. The discussion of belief draws on themes in the work of Jaspers and the later Wittgenstein, which complement and enrich the position attributed to Husserl in Chapter 5. This is followed by a brief consideration of the anticipatory structure of memory. I then bring together the various strands of argument from this and earlier chapters in order to offer a full statement of my central thesis, according to which the sense of being in a given intentional state is largely attributable to its distinctive temporal profile. Next, I turn to the links between trauma (in particular, childhood trauma) and psychosis, in order to further support my position. In so doing, I ask whether and how certain forms of experience associated with trauma are distinguishable from those associated with schizophrenia diagnoses. I also offer an interpretation of the text Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (Sechehaye, 1970), in order to illustrate how a greater emphasis on the relational structure of experience can prompt us to re-interpret first-person accounts. The chapter concludes with some tentative remarks on how a phenomenological account of the modal structure of experience and its vulnerability to disruption can be brought into mutually illuminating dialogue with neurobiological research on predictive coding.