Humphrey's invention of 'the ipsundrum' is clearly an effort to minimize, distance, and distort the
ipseity (sense of self-reference, of 'mineness', in lived experience) that is widely recognized in analytical and phenomenological philosophy of mind and consciousness studies as well as in psychology and psychotherapy. This paper adds to our understanding of the nature of ipseity.
Self-disorders and Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Reappraisal of Poor Insight and Noncompliance
Mads G. Henriksen*,1,2 and
Josef Parnas 1 , 2
Extract:
". . .The notion of disordered self as the core disturbance of schizophrenia appears in all foundational texts on schizophrenia (eg, Kraepelin, Bleuler, Minkowski, Jaspers, and Schneider) but was only recently revived in contemporary psychiatry.
18–24 The
experience of being a self, which is what here is at stake, signifies that we live our (conscious) life in the first-person perspective, as a self-present, single, temporally persistent, bodily, and bounded subject of experience. Phenomenology
25 and neuroscience
26 operate with the notion of “minimal” or “core” self to define a formal structure of experience that necessarily must be in place in order for us to have any experiences at all. The minimal self refers to the first-personal articulation of experience, typically called “mineness,” “myness,” “for-me-ness” or
ipseity.
27 It is a sense of “I-me-myself” that implicitly (prereflectively) permeates our experiences across the flux of time and changing modalities of conscious life. Ipseity is a condition of the so-called radical self-identification, which means that I am
always already aware of “I-me-myself” and have no need for self-observation or self-reflection to assure myself of being myself. Ipseity thus conveys the very basic, persisting identity core, upon which more rich and complex feelings of identity and of being a
person emerge and are created throughout our life.
The basic sense of minimal selfhood goes together with an automatic, unreflected immersion in the shared-social world (variously called, eg, “common sense” [Blankenburg], “sense of reality” [Jaspers] or “fonction du réel” [Janet]). The world is always pregiven, ie, tacitly grasped as a self-evident background of all experiencing and meaning. One is not only self-present but also present in the midst of the world of which one is partaking. This tacit and foundational self-world
structure manifests itself as our ordinary “natural ontological attitude”: the world is pregiven as
real, mind-independent, and constrained by the principles of space, time, causality, and noncontradiction, essentially making it reliable, predictable, and ontologically secure.
This basic self-world structure is disturbed in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, ie, it is constantly
challenged,
unstable, and
oscillating, resulting in alarming and alienating anomalous self-experiences (also termed “self-disorders”), typically occurring already in childhood or early adolescence.
24 The patients feel ephemeral, lacking core identity, profoundly, yet often ineffably different from others (Anderssein) and alienated from the social world. There is a diminished sense of existing as a bodily subject, distortions of the first-person perspective with a failing sense of “mineness” of the field of awareness (eg, “it feels as if the thoughts aren’t really mine”), and a deficient sense of privacy of the inner world. There is a significant lack of attunement and immersion in the world, inadequate prereflective grasp of self-evident meanings (perplexity), and hyper-reflectivity (eg, “I only live in my head” and “I always observe myself”). Although patients often suffer from self-disorders, the latter are usually lived in an ego-syntonic way, as
modes rather than as
objects, of the patients’ experience, ie, often affecting more the “how” than the “what” of experience. What is important to emphasize at this point is that the self-disorders, reflecting the unstable basic self-world structure, destabilize the natural ontological attitude and may throw the patient into a new ontological-existential perspective, an often solipsistic framework, no longer ruled by the “natural” certitudes concerning space, time, causality, and noncontradiction. Unconstrained by these certitudes, the world may appear as only apparent or staged, ontologically mind-dependent, prone to noncausal relations, and the patient may experience a unique access to deeper layers of reality, which are inaccessible to others. Often, these experiences evoke a specific sense of grandiosity, leaving others to be seen as oblivious to the true nature of reality and only concerned with everyday trivialities. . . ."
Self-disorders and Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Reappraisal of Poor Insight and Noncompliance
