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Autism in Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Study

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An Experiential Approach to Psychopathology

Abstract

The notion of autism, as depicted by continental psychopathology, describes the essential feature of schizophrenia: an impressive private world far from the intersubjective horizon of life. A clinical case is here analyzed. Five analytical categories were selected to account for the structure of autism in schizophrenia: the cognitive categorization processes, the system of values, the social attunement, the Self setting-up process and the lived space experience. Each category represents a facet of Common Sense, the basic link that bonds each individual to the shared social system. Schizophrenic disturbance of common sense results in a semantic drift, an epistemic eccentricity, a crisis of attunement, a spatial derailment, and finally an ontological instability; there is a circular relationship between all these categories; disorder of embodiment (dis-embodiment) may be considered the common, generative root determining the dramatic corrosion of the pre-reflective basic structures of subjectivity (lived body, self and temporalization, the pre-reflective attunement with others, the indwelling in the world) inducing also the morbid arrangement of the higher-order structures of subjectivity (i.e., identity, the symbolization processes and the system of values).

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Nicholas Barrett and Barbara Ciomei, European University Institute, Florence, Italy, for the linguistic revision of the chapter.

I made every efforts in order to make the case presentation not recognizable.

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  1. Mental Health Department, Azienda Sanitaria di Firenze, Florence, Italy

    Massimo Ballerini

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  1. Massimo Ballerini
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Correspondence to Massimo Ballerini .

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  1. Department of Psycho,Humanis.&Terr. Sci, Uni"D.Portales",Chile,&Uni“G.D’Annunzio”, Chieti, Italy

    Giovanni Stanghellini

  2. Sapienza Univ&Crossing Dialogues Assoc., Rome, Italy

    Massimiliano Aragona

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Ballerini, M. (2016). Autism in Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Study. In: Stanghellini, G., Aragona, M. (eds) An Experiential Approach to Psychopathology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29945-7_15

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