Autism in schizophrenia: A phenomenological study

Abstract

The notion of autism, as depicted by continental psychopathology, describes the essential feature of schizophrenia: an impressive private world far from the intersubjective horizon of life. A clinical case is here analyzed. Five analytical categories were selected to account for the structure of autism in schizophrenia: the cognitive categorization processes, the system of values, the social attunement, the Self setting-up process and the lived space experience. Each category represents a facet of Common Sense, the basic link that bonds each individual to the shared social system. Schizophrenic disturbance of common sense results in a semantic drift, an epistemic eccentricity, a crisis of attunement, a spatial derailment, and finally an ontological instability; there is a circular relationship between all these categories; disorder of embodiment (dis-embodiment) may be considered the common, generative root determining the dramatic corrosion of the pre-reflective basic structures of subjectivity (lived body, self and temporalization, the pre-reflective attunement with others, the indwelling in the world) inducing also the morbid arrangement of the higher-order structures of subjectivity (i.e., identity, the symbolization processes and the system of values).