ABSTRACT

The “as-if”-function may be regarded as a crucial capacity of the human mind. This function allows us to suspend the validity of immediate experience and to take things to mean or represent something other than themselves. It manifests itself in imagination, phantasy, image consciousness, in pretense, or in metaphorical language. The “as if”-function is also necessary for perspective-taking and mutual understanding: I have to bracket my body-centered existence, as it were, and for a moment pretend to be in the other’s place. However, in order not to lose myself in this oscillation, it is also necessary to keep up the difference between the embodied and the virtual perspective.

In schizophrenia, a failure or loss of the “as-if” becomes apparent mainly in concretism, in the inability to interpret proverbs, or in the passage from abnormal experiences expressed in terms of “as-if” to full-blown delusion. In these cases, the tension between the metaphorical and the concrete level of meaning can no longer be maintained, and both levels are equated. For the same reason, perspective-taking in social situations threatens schizophrenia patients with a loss of the self: they are drawn into the decentered perspective and cannot maintain their own embodied center. The perspectives of self and other are then confused instead of being integrated. This chapter develops a concept of the “as-if” and investigates its failure in typical pathologies that are found in schizophrenia.