Schizophrenia and Common Sense: A Phenomenological Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to develop a phenomenological understanding of schizophrenia and to affirm the existence of a corporeal self that is necessary for our “being-in-the-world” and for our common sense. This corporeal sense of self could be lost in specific psychiatric disorders. In fact, adopting an embodied approach and applying phenomenological concepts to neuroscientific, psychiatric and medical studies allows us to fully understand the complexity of the human being, a being completely rooted in his/her body and in the world. After briefly describing the role of Leib in the phenomenological tradition, I will compare the typical symptoms of schizophrenia and those of melancholic depression. Then, I will show that the symptoms that characterize schizophrenia, such as the weakness of the sense of self, the disruption of corporeal functions and the isolation of the subject from the world, could be synonymous with a disorder of an embodied self, something that psychiatrists like Thomas Fuchs and Giovanni Stanghellini have defined as a “disembodiment”. This progressive alienation of the self involves structural loss in the most important perceptual, cognitive and affective fields of human life: for this reason, a phenomenological analysis seems to be useful to the scientific approach in order to clarify how this tacit bodily structure of the self is lost and how our bodily self is central to our common understanding of reality.