Psychopathology
January 1, 2017
Tudi Gozé, Till Grohmann, Jean Naudin et al.
14 citations
Schizophrenia involves a radical incomprehensibility of patients' experience, yet clinicians often sense its presence through a 'praecox feeling.' This paper proposes that affectivity—the way emotions and feelings connect body, self, world, and others—can explain this paradox. Drawing on Marc Richir's phenomenology, the authors argue that affectivity has a twofold bodily constitution that grounds embodied affective resonance, enabling empathic understanding. This model links affectivity to minimal self-disturbance in schizophrenia and highlights its intersubjective dimension, offering a coherent theoretical framework for the clinician's paradoxical comprehension.
Psychopathology
January 1, 2023
Cassandre Bois, István Fazakas, Juliette Salles et al.
12 citations
Borderline personality disorder involves a fragmentation of narrative identity, a widely shared view that has been challenged by alternative perspectives emphasizing agency. This article contributes to that debate using a phenomenological approach. It reviews the narrative interpretation, justifies a stratified model of the self based on phenomenology, and draws on László Tengelyi's three layers of self—self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self—to integrate competing concepts from Fuchs, Schmidt, Gold, Kyratsous, and Zahavi. The final section reconfigures the identity-related experiences and manifestations of BPD through this layered phenomenological lens.
Comprehensive Psychiatry
February 2, 2021
Florent Poupart, Manon Bouscail, Gésine Sturm et al.
12 citations
Patients rarely act on their delusions, a paradox noted by early psychopathologists Eugen Bleuler and Karl Jaspers. A critical review of psychopathological literature finds that phenomenological psychiatry links this inconsequentiality to disorders of self-experience, while analytical philosophy debates whether delusions are beliefs, certainties, or imaginations. Empirical studies on acting on delusion focus on violent and safety-seeking behaviors, showing these actions are driven by emotional outbursts of anger or fear rather than delusional content. Delusional inconsequentiality remains poorly conceptualized but is implicitly supported by evidence that affectivity, not beliefs, motivates delusional actions. The authors propose it as a promising concept for future psychopathological research.
Psychopathology
January 1, 2020
Tudi Gozé, Istvan Fazakas
12 citations
Anomalies of imagination are common and disabling in schizophrenia spectrum disorders but have been neglected in psychopathology due to the lack of a conceptual framework. Recently, the link between minimal self disorders and pathology of imagination has been emphasized. This article discusses that initiative by drawing on the recent imaginary turn in phenomenological research, which is active in philosophy but rarely applied in psychopathology or cognitive sciences. The authors examine psychopathological literature on anomalous fantasy and imagination, provide an overview of the phenomenological imaginary turn, and explore how fantasy and imagination are involved in embodiment and identity. They also consider implications for psychotherapy and recovery.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
István Fazakas, Mathilde Bois, Tudi Gozé
7 citations
Selfhood, even at its most basic level, has a bodily thickness that can be altered in schizophrenia. Drawing on Sartre's concept of coenesthesia—the translucent material of consciousness—and historical research, the authors argue that the minimal self is not a bare point but an embodied, elemental feeling. This phenomenological materiality, or bodily element of ipseity, helps explain anomalies of self-experience in schizophrenia spectrum disorders without reducing selfhood so drastically that it cannot account for experiential changes.