Psychopathology and Corporality: The Possibilities of Intersubjectivity for Restoring Experience. The Cases of Schizophrenia and Autism

Abstract

Starting from a phenomenological analysis of the lived body [Leib], and then coming to the phenomenological genesis of verbalization, it can be shown that the self and intersubjectivity have their original sense and constituent possibility in pre-linguistic experience, essentially tied to corporality, and not in reflexive structures of superior strata. Moreover, the phenomenological approach points out that psychic pathologies cannot be understood as mere brain illnesses, but that they have their own “place” in the lived relation between subject and world, which is mediated by corporality [Leiblichkeit]. When the latter loses its transparency, experience is affected and the intersubjective world, able to be experienced, gets lost. On the basis of these phenomenological principles contrasted with some fruitful therapies, I intend to show that there is evidence to maintain that a minimal self and intersubjectivity do not get lost even in extreme psychic illnesses (such as schizophrenia and autism), in which precisely personality and intersubjectivity—including linguistic and communication capacities—as such are disrupted. And consequently, these assumptions should become not only premises to overcome the prevailing medical and even psychiatric dichotomy between bodily functions and mental states—which disregards the person in its unitary, concrete and bodily [leiblich] existence—but also the condition of the possibility of effectiveness of a therapy.