Phenomenological Accounts
March 7, 2023 Sarah R. Kamens, Frederick J. Wertz
Chapter 3 traces the early 20th-century importation of phenomenological approaches into psychiatric discourse on schizophrenia. Karl Jaspers, influenced by Edmund Husserl, described an intersubjective impasse as the essence of schizophrenia, which he viewed as ultimately 'un-understandable.' Later phenomenologists departed from Jaspers' view of empathic impossibility, positing that psychosis involves core alterations in the experience of self and world that can be meaningfully understood from the perspective of lived experience. The chapter outlines varied phenomenological attempts to describe psychosis, including R.D. Laing's theory of ontological insecurity, Blankenburg's loss of 'natural self-evidence,' and Louis Sass and colleagues' 'ipseity disturbance model.'