Subjectivity and Selfhood by Dan Zahavi

Author:Dan Zahavi [Zahavi, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

Consciousness and Self | 133

The study of pathological phenomena might not only serve as a demonstration of the empirical relevance of the phenomenological analysis of self; on its own it might enrich our understanding of the nature of selfhood.

Pathological cases can function as a heuristic device that shocks one into an awareness of what is normally taken for granted. They may be employed as a means of gaining distance from the familiar, in order better to explicate it.

To put it another way, core features of subjectivity, including fundamental aspects of self-experience, can be sharply illuminated through a study of their pathological distortions. These distortions may reveal, through their very absence, aspects of normal existence that frequently remain unnoticed. In using pathology as a contrast, it will also become clear that normality cannot be taken for granted; it is, itself, an achievement.

The Case of Schizophrenia

In his Allgemeine Psychopathology, Jaspers famously wrote that schizophrenia is characterized by its un-understandability or incomprehensibility.

What he meant by this was that schizophrenic symptoms are so strange and bizarre that they remain inaccessible to empathy and meaningful reconstruction. More specifically, Jaspers distinguished between static un-understandability, which refers to their inaccessibility to empathy, and genetic un-understandability, which refers to the impossibility of understanding the development or emergence of psychotic symptoms (Jaspers 1959, 24, 251, 483–486). By implication, there is not much to be won by paying close attention to the first-person accounts of schizophrenic patients.

Their disturbed self-descriptions do not present us with a key to an understanding of schizophrenia; rather they must be seen as senseless ravings or morbid eruptions of a malfunctioning brain.

Jaspers’s claims were based on a study of the chronic stages of schizophrenia. In recent years, however, Parnas and Sass have argued that a study of the advanced stages of the illness is of limited value if one wishes to understand the core features of the illness. This is so not only because of the apparent incomprehensibility of the symptoms, but also because the advanced stages confront one with the results of a long-standing interaction between multiple factors, such as the effects of medication, social isolation, and stress.

This complexity inevitably makes it much harder to isolate the primary pathogenetic factors.

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