After a brief perusal of the various meanings of phenomenology in psychopathology, the contributions to schizophrenia of phenomenological psychology in the European sense are reviewed. The last twenty years are deemed fruitful and productive. Following the central themes and motives of this literature allows us to come to a different and perhaps wider understanding of schizophrenia than that proposed currently by mainstream psychiatry. These diverse investigations converge in seeing as the core of schizophrenia the disorders related to inter-subjectivity and ipseity (...) , in turn related to what Bleuler had once called Autism. Finally, a critical discussion of the limitations and the strengths of the phenomenological approach is offered. (shrink)

Many with schizophrenia find social interactions a profound and terrifying threat to their sense of self. To better understand this we draw upon dialogical models of the self that suggest that those with schizophrenia have difficulty sustaining dialogues among diverse aspects of self. Because interpersonal exchanges solicit and evoke movement among diverse aspects of self, many with schizophrenia may consequently find those exchanges overwhelming, resulting in despair, the sensation of fusion with another, and/or self-dissolution. In short, compromised dialogical capacities may (...) be a contributing factor to social dysfunction in schizophrenia. (shrink)