We present a schizophrenia patient who reports "seeing rain" with attendant somatosensory features which separate him from his surroundings. Because visual/multimodal hallucinations are understudied in schizophrenia, we examine a case history to determine the role of these hallucinations in self-disturbances (Ichstörungen). Developed by the early Heidelberg School, self-disturbances comprise...
This chapter examines whether hallucinations are related to the problem of phenomenal consciousness and how historical contributions to the phenomenology of hallucinations, notably the Early Heidelberg School (1909–1932), shed light on hallucinations in schizophrenia. We focus specifically on Mayer-Gross, who in his phenomenological analysis of hallucinations during psychosis, drew from studies...
Recent psychiatric research and treatment initiatives have tended to move away from traditional diagnostic categories and have focused instead on transdiagnostic phenomena, such as hallucinations. However, this emphasis on isolated experiences may artificially limit the definition of such phenomena and ignore the rich, complex, and dynamic changes occurring simultaneously in other domains of...
Decades ago, several authors have proposed that disorders in automatic processing lead to intrusive symptoms or abnormal contents in the consciousness of people with schizophrenia. However, since then, studies have mainly highlighted difficulties in patients' conscious experiencing and processing but rarely explored how unconscious and conscious mechanisms may interact in producing this...
Current theories in the framework of hierarchical predictive coding propose that positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions and hallucinations, arise from an alteration in Bayesian inference, the term inference referring to a process by which learned predictions are used to infer probable causes of sensory data. However, for one particularly striking and frequent symptom of...
BACKGROUND: First rank symptoms (FRS) of schizophrenia have been used for decades for diagnostic purposes. In the new version of the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has abolished any further reference to FRS of schizophrenia and treats them like any other "criterion A" symptom (e.g. any kind of hallucination or delusion) with regard to their diagnostic implication. The ICD-10...
Self-disorders (SDs) (from the German Ichstörungen) are alterations of the first-person perspective, long associated with schizophrenia, particularly in early phases. Although psychopathological features of SDs continue to be studied, their neurobiological underpinnings are unknown. This makes it difficult to integrate SDs into contemporary models of psychosis. The present review aims to...
With a tradition of examining self-disturbances (Ichstörungen) in schizophrenia, phenomenological psychiatry studies the person's subjective experience without imposing theoretical agenda on what is reported. Although this tradition offers promising interface with current neurobiological models of schizophrenia, both the concept of Ichstörung and its history are not well understood. In this...
Following the publication of Karl Jaspers' General Psychopathology (1913), delusions have been characterized as being nonunderstandable in terms of the person's biography, motivations, and historical-cultural context. According to Jaspers, this loss of understandability is due to an underlying neurobiological process, which has interrupted the normal development of the individual's personality....
Kafka's writings are frequently interpreted as representing the historical period of modernism in which he was writing. Little attention has been paid, however, to the possibility that his writings may reflect neural mechanisms in the processing of self during hypnagogic (i.e., between waking and sleep) states. Kafka suffered from dream-like, hypnagogic hallucinations during a sleep-deprived...
A controversy rages in philosophical approaches to mind that goes to the core of the mind/body problem in psychiatry:how is it possible that a physical system, no matter complex, can give rise to the subjective experience of consciousness? Taking this irreducibility of consciousness into account, philosophical approaches to cognitive neuroscience and psychopathology, as well as the rapid...