Abstract
Decades ago, several authors have proposed that disorders in automatic processing
lead to intrusive symptoms or abnormal contents in the consciousness of people
with schizophrenia. However, since then, studies have mainly highlighted difficulties in
patients’ conscious experiencing and processing but rarely explored how unconscious
and conscious mechanisms may interact in producing this experience. We report
three lines of research, focusing on the processing of spatial frequencies, unpleasant
information, and time-event structure that suggest that impairments occur at both the
unconscious and conscious level.We argue that focusing on unconscious, physiological
and automatic processing of information in patients, while contrasting that processing
with conscious processing, is a first required step before understanding how distortions
or other impairments emerge at the conscious level. We then indicate that the
phenomenological tradition of psychiatry supports a similar claim and provides a
theoretical framework helping to understand the relationship between the impairments
and clinical symptoms. We base our argument on the presence of disorders in the
minimal self in patients with schizophrenia. The minimal self is tacit and non-verbal and
refers to the sense of bodily presence. We argue this sense is shaped by unconscious
processes, whose alteration may thus affect the feeling of being a unique individual. This
justifies a focus on unconscious mechanisms and a distinction from those associated
with consciousness.