New Insight into Affectivity in Schizophrenia: from the Phenomenology of Marc Richir.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

According to Karl Jaspers, psychopathology requires a comprehensive method, understood as a systematic exploration of the first-person perspective of the patient's experience. At the same time, however, schizophrenia for Jaspers is characterized by its radical incomprehensibility. In addition, Rümke's so-called "praecox feeling" paradoxically combines the incomprehensibility of schizophrenic experience and the evidence of its pathological manifestation in the encounter. Through a re-examination of the notions of affectivity and interaffective contact we propose a coherent theoretical model to explain the clinician's paradoxical understanding of schizophrenia. Phenomenological tradition regards affectivity as an encompassing phenomenon that connects body, self, world, and others. In our view, only a thorough and systematic link between corporeity and affectivity is able to explain embodied affective resonance as a basis of empathic comprehension. By drawing on the phenomenology of Marc Richir, we will systematically unfold the complex nature of affectivity and lead it back to a twofold constitution of corporeality. The Richirian account on affectivity can be fruitfully put into discussion with other recent phenomenological models on schizophrenia. It might be able to exhibit affectivity as the operative ground of minimal self-disturbance and thus argue for its intersubjective dimension.