Mental illness is often seen as a dissolution of the ego, confronting the psychotic with frightening limits of perception, understanding, vulnerability, and intersubjectivity. This paper examines mental illness phenomenologically as both a limited and an unlimited experience of intersubjectivity. On one hand, it limits access to the Other; on the other, it opens a new world that can be transposed into artistic expression. Drawing on clinical studies by Marguerite Sechehaye and Rosemarie Samaritter, the author identifies three disturbed experiential layers in schizophrenia: the affective, the symbolic, and the kinesthetic, where spatial presence and body movements shape the sense of self. The paper then explores art and schizophrenia to consider how psychotics transcend experiential limits.
Synaesthesia, where sensory or cognitive stimuli trigger additional sensations, is difficult to explain and challenges embodied accounts of cognition. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's claim that "synaesthetic perception is the rule," this paper argues that synaesthesia and embodied sense-making illuminate each other because synaesthesia's strangeness reveals the complexity of normal sense-making. Unlike Heidegger's broken hammer, synaesthesia is not a failure of practical engagement but, like Cézanne's art, discloses and amplifies key dynamics of Being-in-the-world. Examining synaesthetic dynamics—especially the 'difference in union' of embodied sense-making—in motivation, temporality, and intersubjectivity enriches understanding of both general Being-in-the-world and the phenomenon called synaesthesia.
Affections and emotions are central and foundational for organizing conscious mental life; consciousness cannot be concrete without emotions. Drawing on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and its followers, the article argues that the affective sphere serves as the organizing center of concrete life and consciousness. It then examines neurophysiological foundations, supporting subcortical theories of emotions and consciousness that extend the capacity for consciousness at least to all vertebrates.