Praecox Feeling and Empathic Incomprehensibility in Schizophrenia According to Merleau-Ponty’s Description of Intercorporeity

Abstract

This article investigates the conditions of possibility for the Praecox-Gefühl (PF), the feeling of atmospheric strangeness experienced in the encounter with the schizophrenic patient, as described by Rümke. It aims to offer a phenomenological description of this experience of empathic incomprehensibility, taking as its basis the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, especially his work Phenomenology of Perception. The argument demonstrates how the experience of an “I” (corporeity) and of a “we” (intercorporeity) is founded upon a pre-reflective bodily intentionality, an “anonymous body” that anchors us in a world of shared significations. Through the analysis of clinical examples such as the phantom limb and anosognosia, and through the contrast between normal and pathological lived experience, the text reveals that health depends on a tacit harmony between the habitual body (past) and the actual body (present), and on an intercorporeal fusion with the other. It concludes that schizophrenia manifests as a double disharmony: a fracture in the intersubjective bridge that connects us to others and a fracture in the foundation that unites one’s own mind to one’s own body. PF is, therefore, the direct clinical apprehension of this double fracture. In this way, the study reaffirms PF not only as a diagnostic tool, but as a “guiding thread” that illuminates the invisible architecture of existence and points toward new avenues for understanding human consciousness.