Disorders of the self in schizophrenia involve a disturbance of the minimal self—the most basic component of selfhood. This work synthesizes concepts from neuroscience, epistemology, and phenomenology to argue that the second-person perspective, which focuses on direct interaction and experience with others, offers a key point of congruence between objective processes and subjective experience. The author examines self-related deficits in schizophrenia first through first-person and third-person perspectives, then through the less understood second-person perspective. First-person disturbances include spatially incongruent proprioception and an impaired sense of time. The second-person approach is productive for social cognition research and may yield practical consequences for evidence-based medicine.
Phenomenology offers a disciplined method for investigating patients' lived experience that can serve as a methodological foundation for ethical psychiatric practice, not merely a humanistic supplement. By clarifying how illness reorganizes the patient's lived world, phenomenological inquiry deepens psychiatric assessment alongside conventional diagnosis. This enriched understanding strengthens autonomy, informed consent, shared decision-making, diagnostic humility, and psychiatric education. The paper argues that attending to lived experience should be regarded as a professional obligation within psychiatry, complementing diagnostic reliability, neuroscience, and evidence-based treatment rather than replacing them.