The phenomenology of the intersubjective impairment.

Summary

Disorders of the self in schizophrenia involve a disturbance of the minimal self—the most basic component of selfhood. This work synthesizes concepts from neuroscience, epistemology, and phenomenology to argue that the second-person perspective, which focuses on direct interaction and experience with others, offers a key point of congruence between objective processes and subjective experience. The author examines self-related deficits in schizophrenia first through first-person and third-person perspectives, then through the less understood second-person perspective. First-person disturbances include spatially incongruent proprioception and an impaired sense of time. The second-person approach is productive for social cognition research and may yield practical consequences for evidence-based medicine.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Several studies suggest that the disorders of the self include a disturbance of the most elementary component of self - the minimal self. Characterizing these disorders and understanding the mechanisms involved remain a challenge to medical epistemology and health care professionals. In the present work, I bring together concepts of different fields, such as neuroscience, epistemology and phenomenology. The main goal is to show that the second-person perspective can be used to point out particular features of social cognition and its related psychopathology. Taking the hypothesis that the second-person perspective is the congruence point between an objective process and the subjective experience, I will attempt to explain schizophrenia as a self-related deficit, first in the light of the first-person and the third-person perspective and afterward, in the light of the poorly less understood second-person perspective. On the one hand, the first-person experience is correlated both with space and time. In fact, psychiatric patients report subjective experiences that can be understood within research on the bodily self, such as (1) spatially incongruent proprioception and (2) impaired sense of time as the basic mechanism that allows conscious experience. On the other hand, the second-person approach has already begun to prove productive within social cognition research, pointing out the importance of experiencing and interacting with others as our primarily way well-being. I will phenomenological analyse subjective and intersubjective experience in the disorders of the self and derive practical consequences to evidence-based medicine.