Disturbance of Ego-Boundary Enaction in Schizophrenia

Abstract

The psychopathology of schizophrenic conditions is today often characterized merely in diverse and disjunctive symptomatic terms. Classically, however, what was understood to underpin and unify such diverse symptoms was a disturbance to the 'self' or 'ego,' especially in that ego's boundaries. As psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories have become less influential in psychiatry, concepts like 'self' or 'ego,' 'self-other distinction' or 'ego boundary,' have become less popular as psychopathological organizers, with the result that the very idea of distinctively 'schizophrenic' conditions has itself also appeared to want for validity. Yet within the philosophy of psychology, enactivism provides a new naturalistic framework for understanding the emergence and maintenance of the self-other distinction. This framework considers the distinction neither as something constituted a priori, nor as something showing up within experience, but rather as a continuously enacted achievement. The contention of this article is that an enactivist perspective provides us with the apparatus to retheorize the conception of ego boundaries, contribute to the reunification of the 'schizophrenia' concept, and inform the provision of therapies targeted at the schizophrenic diathesis itself.