Psychopathology and Corporality: The Possibilities of Intersubjectivity for restoring experience - The cases of Schizophrenia and Autism

IVANA ANTON MLINAR

Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update: A Translational Approach

Springer

Lugar: New York / Dordrecht / London; Año: 2017; p. 13 - 20

Starting from a phenomenological analysis of the livedbody [Leib], and then coming to the phenomenological genesis of verbalization,it can be shown that the self and intersubjectivity have their originary senseand constituent possibility in pre-linguistic experience, essentially tied tocorporality, and not in reflexive structures of superior strata. Moreover, thephenomenological approach points out that psychic pathologies cannot beunderstood as mere brain illnesses, but that they have their own "place" in thelived relation between subject and world, that is mediated by corporality[Leiblichkeit]. When the latter loses its transparency, experience is affectedand the intersubjective experienceable world gets lost. On the basis of these phenomenologicalprinciples contrasted with some fruitful therapies I intend to show that thereis evidence to maintain that a minimal self and intersubjectivity do not getlost even in extreme psychic illnesses (as schizophrenia and autism), in whichprecisely personality and intersubjectivity ?including linguistic andcommunication capacities? as such are disrupted. And consequently, theseassumptions should become not only premises to overcome the prevailing medicaland even psychiatric dichotomy between bodily functions and mental states ?thatdisregards the person in its unitary, concrete and bodily [leiblich]existence-, but also the condition of the possibility of effectiveness of atherapy.