Abstract
The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation.
Highlights
What cognitive scientists think about the nature of cognition has implications for understanding mental disorders, i.e. when the mind goes wrong (Fuchs and Schlimme 2009; Drayson 2009; Colombetti 2013)
One school of embodied cognitive science - the enactive approach - assumes that there is no clear-cut ontological split between the individual and its environment, and that the embodied mind emerges through active engagement with the world (Varela et al 1993; Thompson 2007)
The two accounts of schizophrenia are examples of a more progressive account of psychopathology, which can be summarised in terms of an emphasis on subjective experience, sociality, and embodiment
Summary
What cognitive scientists think about the nature of cognition has implications for understanding mental disorders, i.e. when the mind goes wrong (Fuchs and Schlimme 2009; Drayson 2009; Colombetti 2013). It is assumed that basic concepts from enactive cognition, the notions of autonomy and sense-making (Di Paolo et al 2010; Thompson 2007; Kyselo 2014) can inspire a more encompassing view on the self and a complementary perspective on 1st person and 3rd person perspectives. They offer a suitable framework to integrate valuable insights in recent accounts of disorders of the self: the emphasises of the bodily self, subjective experience as well as of intersubjectivity. Coming back to the discussion of schizophrenia, these principles are applied to illustrate how an enactive perspective on disorders of the self can begin to elaborate and complement previous embodied and social approaches to schizophrenia
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