Foundational Common Sense and its Disturbance: a Phenomenological Theory of Schizophrenic Autism

Abstract

Abstract Phenomenological research on ipseity-disturbance in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) has yielded strong empirical results. However, recent theoretical work has questioned how the ipseity-disturbance framework accommodates the world-embedded, intersubjective dynamics of SSD. Schizophrenic autism provides a helpful theoretical prism to grasp the interrelation of disturbed selfhood, worldhood and intersubjectivity in SSD. This paper develops a theory of schizophrenic autism grounded in what I term foundational common sense (FCS). Drawing primarily on Knudsen, Blankenburg, and Heidegger, FCS names an intersubjective dimension structurally immanent to subjectivity: our meaning-ascriptions are constitutively open to the indeterminate, inexhaustible surplus of meaning ascribable by others. FCS sustains ongoing triangulation between self, world, and other. Drawing on Sass, and via close analysis of two prototypical cases of schizophrenic autism described by Blankenburg and Minkowski, the article argues that schizophrenic autism consists in a disturbance of FCS, which may become hyperreflexively focalized. Thereby, triangulation risks collapse into a line - either a self-effacing line ( self -world-other) marked by self-alienating perplexity in navigating the commonsensical world of others, or an own-worldly line (self-world- other ) marked by idiosyncratic self-assurance. This account of schizophrenic autism situates ipseity-disturbance within a dynamic, relational architecture, that avoids excessively reifying and abstracting ipseity out of the intersubjective world it is situated in. It thus secures a) an appreciation of the depth and specificity of ipseity-disturbance in SSD, while b) providing an account of how this disturbance is modulable by intersubjective and worldly-contextual factors, without thereby being reducible to these factors. Finally, implications for recovery are briefly considered.