ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the phenomenological approach to mental disorder by focusing on schizophrenia and related conditions, generally viewed as the most severe forms of mental illness. Phenomenology is the intellectual tradition that studies subjectivity or “lived experience,” “what it is like” to exist as a conscious human being or human being of a particular kind. Recent decades have seen a major revival of the phenomenological approach to psychopathology, which has long taken psychotic disorders as its prime topic. This chapter offers an introduction to this approach, placing emphasis on the schizophrenia spectrum and on the role of “self-disorder” in these conditions, namely, on disruptions of one’s core sense of existing as a subject of experience or agent of action (termed “ipseity”). Such disruptions are intimately linked with transformations in the experience of time, space, causality, and other people. After considering challenges inherent in the study of subjectivity, the chapter turns to schizophrenia and its symptoms, then discusses the key role of forms of exaggerated self-consciousness (“hyper-reflexivity”) along with a weakened sense of subjective existence or vitality (“diminished self-presence”). The chapter concludes by considering implications for several issues, including diagnostic practices, psychotherapy, scientific research, and our general understanding of human existence.
