The notion of minimal, basic, pre-reflective or core self is currently debated in the philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences and developmental psychology. However, it is not clear which experiential features such a self is believed to possess. Studying the schizophrenic experience may help exploring the following aspects of the minimal self: the notion of perspective and first person perspective, the ‘mineness’ of the phenomenal field, the questions of transparency, embodiment of point of view, and the issues of agency and ownership, (...) considered as different and less fundamental than the feeling of mineness. Two clinical vignettes of patients with the diagnosis of schizophrenia will be presented: the first one, illustrating early illness stages, and the second case, of chronic schizophrenia, symptomatically marked by persistent hallucinations. Through their analysis, we will discuss the experiential dimensions of minimal self. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the phenomenological significance of schizophrenics' auditory hallucinations and begins with the face-to-face relationship in order to describe the schizophrenic experience. Following European psychiatrists like Blackenburg and Tatossian, the authors compare the bracketing of reality in the Husserlian phenomenological reduction with that of the hallucinatory experience. "Hallucinatory epoché" is used to refer to the schizophrenic way to experiencing auditory hallucinations. The problem of intentionality is then discussed, in addition to that of dialogue, internal time, living body, and (...) intersubjectivity. In this way, "voices" appear as a modification of the own inner voice of the hallucinating person. The "other, " at the origin of the "voices, " is described in terms of transparence, the quality of being univocal, and the quality of being a priori in the perfect tense. This other is not an alter ego, "it" is an alius. Descriptions of hallucinatory voices at several levels of experience, that is, at the transcendental and empirical levels along with descriptions at the level of the life-world, may be at the basis of certain modern empirical theories of "voices. " Results obtained from the European phenomenological point of view and Hoffman's findings in the cognitive field are then compared. The authors finally discuss a case of "speech therapy" and argue that a possible avenue for phenomenological research on schizophrenia is to explore narrativity on the basis of single case studies. One of the goals of phenomenological psychiatry is to assist empirical research in finding new relationships between the stories told by the hallucinator-relationships that are presupposed in clinical experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 291-293 [Access article in PDF] Schizophrenia and the Void Jean Naudin and Jean-Michel Azorin It was Eugene Minkowski who, from the 1920s on, introduced the French to the work of Eugen Bleuler, whose student he had been. In the introduction to his first book, Schizophrenia: Psychopathology of Schizoids and Schizophrenics (Minkowski 1927), Minkowski nevertheless notes with regard to Bleuler that he could not (...) allow himself "to be restricted to this student's task." For Minkowski, Bleuler certainly enjoys the great merit of having substituted the notion of schizophrenia for that of dementia praecox and of having described autism with precision. But—Minkowski says—autism is badly defined when, relying upon the concept of Spaltung, Bleuler fails to break free of associationist psychology. Minkowski justifies his critical attitude by appealing, as does Binswanger, to Husserl and above all to Bergson. For Bergson, dissociation is a normal feature of thought. If, for Minkowski, it is important to pay attention to autism, it is because it attests not to a certain fragmentation of consciousness, but rather to an attitude whereby the subject seeks to preserve the precarious equilibrium of a personality that is threatened by a void.The article translated into English for this special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology prefigures Schizophrenia and, like an earlier article on the theme of "morbid rationalism," already announces certain key concepts. Here these concepts are, so to speak, caught in their embryonic state, and one is forced to recognize with Tatossian (1993) how radically Minkowski differs from his master, Bleuler, in the choice of specific cases. By according exemplary significance to cases of "poor autism," Minkowski focuses on the reflexivity of the subjective experience of the patient rather than on the proliferation of the delusional state, which lends itself more readily to clinical observation. We must remember that Minkowski is above all a healer. If, like Bleuler, he is interested in the problem that generates the illness, it is only in order to be able to heal the patient. It is therefore not so much the isolated problem that interests him as the way the person tries to deal with it. So it should not come as a surprise that one of the essential themes of this article is what Minkowski calls "compensation." Like the psychoanalytical concepts to which Bleuler refers, compensation is a dynamic concept. But Minkowski takes care to distinguish the compensation that characterizes the interrogative attitude from motives of a more psychological kind aimed at meeting a lack by symbolically satisfying a desire. In the purely phenomenological sense in which Minkowski takes it, compensation does not refer to a hidden motive. It represents a way of getting around the void or sense of emptiness that results from the schizophrenic person's inability to project himself into the future by pursuing the practical goals of normal, daily life. In this case, the dynamic does not feed off the vicissitudes of drive but off the élan vital—or rather, off the decline of élan vital that such persons suffer. [End Page 291]Minkowski particularly insists upon the fact that Paul's interrogative attitude is not simple curiosity, even if Paul's questioning began with sexual curiosity. Confronted with incessant questioning reminiscent of a child, a psychoanalyst would be likely to invoke infantile curiosity concerning procreation and sexual difference. Minkowski, however, seeks to show that the prevailing motive in Paul's case is not so much desire for knowledge as the vital necessity of finding a way of—can one put it this way?—playing for time. In other words, the interrogatory attitude is a way of avoiding confrontation with the realm of practical concerns that, at bottom, makes the patient suffer. If this realm makes him suffer, it is because the absence of any vital attachment leaves him floating in a kind of void. The fundamental problem of schizophrenia is therefore identified as the loss of meaning going along with a deficiency in the individual's attachment to practical reality. Practical reality, or to put it otherwise, an orientation toward practical activity... (shrink)

Husserlian reduction is a rigorous method for describing the foundations of psychiatric experience. With Jaspers we consider three main principles inspired by phenomenological reduction: direct givenness, absence of presuppositions, re-presentation. But with Binswanger alone we refer to eidetic and transcendental reduction: to establish a critical epistemology; to directly investigate the constitutive processes of mental phenomena and their disturbances, freed from their nosological background; to question the constitution of our own experience when facing a person with mental illness. Regarding the last (...) item, we suggest a specific kind of reduction, typically intersubjective from the start, which we call the ‘looking-glass reduction'. The schizophrenic experience -- understood as a ‘loss of taken-for-grantedness’ implying the constitutions of the body, of the other, and of internal time -- is a real ‘epochal provocation’ for the psychiatrist. As the horizon it opens seems to be both corporeal and narrative, this ‘provoking’ of an epoche in the attitude of the psychiatrist himself and the resistances it implies raise important issues regarding the general constitution of human experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Edmund Husserl’s Influence on Karl Jaspers’s Phenomenology”Jean Naudin (bio) and Jean-Michel Azorin (bio)Keywordsphenomenology, intentionality, intuition, empathy, ambiguitySchwartz and Wiggins’s paper clearly shows that Jaspers’s comprehensive psychiatry draws mainly from Husserl’s phenomenology. This thesis enters a current debate opened by Chris Walker and German Berrios about the influence of Husserlian philosophy on Jaspers’s work. This debate, which emerged at the end of the so-called decade of the brain, (...) could be considered perfectly obsolete. But its topicality relies on taking up the challenge of the scientific bases of comprehension in psychiatric experience. Wiggins and Schwartz perfectly achieve this aim by opposing a theory of seeing and a theory of thinking. Works such as Walker’s are grounded on thinking; they are works about theory. They are not works about experience, but rather epistemological or historical works. In contrast, Wiggins and Schwartz suggest to see, as Jaspers did, and not to think, following Husserl by grounding their psychopathology on intuition and presuppositionlessness. They emphasize Jaspers’s method of “making present” by doing a perfect analysis of the issues of translation of vergegenwärtigung as a co-experiencing of mental processes as if they were directly given. These main principles of direct-givenness, presuppositionlessness, and making present pull the Jaspersian concepts to the Husserlian phenomenological reduction and seem like the foremost principle in Husserlian phenomenology: the intuition of the thing in itself. Whereas Jaspers refuted the principle of eidetic reduction, Wiggins and Schwartz clearly show how much he grounded on the basis of the concept of intentionality, discovered and enlightened during Husserl’s life within the horizon of phenomenological reduction. Actually, it seems that the authors take the side of Jaspers to better support their own vision of psychiatric experience, which they more explicitly argued in Husserlian terms of the later period in some other papers (Schwartz and Wiggins 1985; Wiggins and Schwartz 1988, 1991; Wiggins, Schwartz, and Northoff 1990). However, they take care here to struggle exclusively with the epistemological field of their opponents, considering only Jaspers’s own writings and the Husserlian texts that were accessible to Jaspers when he wrote his psychopathology. There is no room for Kant in Jaspers’s main [End Page 37] principles, and this assumption must lead us to consider the horizon opened by Jaspers, that is, the horizon of a science of meaning essentially built on the lived experiences and the bracketing of any kind of a priori. In contrast to the slight influence of Kant, one idea that emerges is that of the straight impact of Dilthey on both Jaspers and Husserl. We perfectly agree with Wiggins and Schwartz that Jaspers, grounding both on Husserl and Dilthey, arrives at a methodological principle that is all his own, by considering both the connections of the life-stories and the objectivity of symptoms. In other words, we can find the originality and maybe the astonishing modernity of Jaspers in his perfect description of the balance between comprehension and observation, between empathy and its limits, that are obviously found in psychotic processes.We thus focused our comments on the following critiques to Jaspers, although they were already well argued in the brief conclusion of Wiggins and Schwartz: (a) the issue of empathy, (b) the limits of Jaspersian phenomenology, and (c) the merits of its genuine ambiguity.The Issue of Empathy. Indeed we have no reliable scientific mean to guarantee the correctness of our intuitions of the other’s mental life, and this problem might lead one to globally reject the method. The discussion of this problem, classical in the Continental literature since the twenties, led the Continental psychiatrists to unfortunately abandon their own traditions. And it is surprising for a Continental psychiatrist to see this debate coming back into the English-speaking literature. When we address the issue of empathy, we have no easy means to abandon folk psychology. Using philosophical slang weakens the attempt to enlighten its foundations instead of describing its values. The suspicion regarding empathy is partially legitimated by the prejudices of Jaspers himself. As psychiatrists, we have to carry on the Jaspersian research by progressively abandoning it and coming back... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 327-329 [Access article in PDF] Husserlian Comments on Blankenburg's "Psychopathology of Common Sense" Osborne P. Wiggins, Michael Alan Schwartz, and Jean Naudin In this essay, Wolfgang Blankenburg sketches his influential view that some of the disturbances of schizophrenia in particular can be interpreted as a pathology of common sense. We think it important at the outset, however, to avoid possible misunderstandings of Blankenburg's (...) point. It is perhaps unfortunate that this point is expressed by use of the phrase, "common sense." As Blankenburg's own essay shows, even among the learned, "common sense" has no definite or univocal meaning. Therefore, it is entirely possible to find many people who, under some conception of "common sense," appear to lack common sense and yet should not be deemed schizophrenic. Consequently, it is probably best to avoid the ambiguous phrase "common sense" altogether and seek to comprehend Blankenburg's point in other terms. That is precisely what we shall attempt here. We do endorse Blankenburg's view. Moreover, we shall pursue his suggestions that a Husserlian phenomenology of our experience of the life-world may provide the basis for developing the kind of psychopathology he seeks. Our ultimate aim, however, is for this phrase "common sense" to vanish into the Husserlian phenomenology we offer, so that all the other meanings of common sense will not threaten Blankenburg's position with misunderstandings.Our comments must remain a mere sketch. Since, however, Husserl's phenomenology is not well known, we shall have to devote some time to outlining those features of it that we deem relevant here.For Husserl, every mental process is an awareness of something. In his terminology, it is "intentional." No mental process occurs in isolation, however. It rather occurs within a concatenation of many other mental processes. Some of these co-occurring mental processes intend the same object; they intend other aspects of the object. For example, a woman may be aware of the color of a dress she is considering wearing. Hence, one process in her mental life is (visually) aware of the brown color. But another process in her mental life may be intending it as a "party dress." And yet another process in her mental life may be (tactually) intending the texture of the cloth. Because all of these mental processes (and many others) intend the same object, namely, the dress, Husserl says that they are synthesized with one another. "Synthesis," then, connotes a multiplicity of mental processes united with one another through intending the same object.Now Husserl believed that it is because the many processes occurring in our mental lives [End Page 327] synthetically intend the many objects we encounter that we experience ourselves as inhabiting a world of objects. If these syntheses failed to occur, we would not experience the world or ourselves as parts of this world. These syntheses make it possible for us to experience objects and events as related to one another in the manifold spatial, causal, temporal, social, political, religious, and other relationships that we do in fact experience. Husserl thus contends that our mental lives "constitute" the world for us. Mental life can accordingly be viewed as "world-constituting." Mental life is thus the condition for the possibility of there being a world of objects for us, to modify Kant's phrase. Husserl thought his notion of world-constituting consciousness sufficiently similar to Kant's for him to appropriate the latter philosopher's concept of "transcendental." Husserl also then spoke of "transcendental consciousness" and the study of this consciousness as "transcendental philosophy."Husserl made many distinctions among kinds of mental processes and their correlative objects. We shall here explicate only one such distinction. Mental processes must be distinguished as those that are actively generated by an ego and those that are not produced by an ego. The latter kind of mental process occurs automatically or, as Husserl writes, "passively." Husserl calls the first kind of mental process "active." Having mentioned him, however, we should also briefly characterize the "ego... (shrink)

I) Introduction : la phénoménologie expérientielle Depuis la plus haute Antiquité, et dans plusieurs continents, les philosophes, les religieux, les sages, les mystiques mais aussi d’autres humains n’ayant que la prétention de moins mal comprendre ce qu’il en est de leur vie mentale, posent un regard réflexif sur le contenu et l’organisation de la vie de l’esprit. En Occident, une étape décisive fut franchie par Husserl, quand il prit le parti d’une analyse systématique et scientifique des vé...

Schizophrenia, like other pathological conditions of mental life, has not been systematically included in the general study of consciousness. By focusing on aspects of chronic schizophrenia, we attempt to remedy this omission. Basic components of Husserl’s phenomenology (intentionality, synthesis, constitution, epoche, and unbuilding) are explicated and then employed in an account of chronic schizophrenia. In schizophrenic experience, basic constituents of reality are lost and the subject must try to explicitly re-constitute them. “Automatic mental life” is weakened such that much of (...) the world that is normally taken-for-granted cannot continue to be so. The subject must actively re-lay the ontological foundations of reality. (shrink)