Jaspers, the Body, and Schizophrenia: The Bodily Self

Abstract

Karl Jaspers laid the foundations of contemporary psychopathology. Among Jaspers' contributions was his powerful vision of psychiatry as a crucial way to shed light on the human condition and existence by integrating the scientific study of psychic diseases with a theoretical approach focused on human experience. This perspective should be revitalized. In the present paper we start from the role Jaspers assigns to the body when discussing the notion of ‘personalization'. We explore the relationship between a minimal notion of the self, the ‘bodily self', and its potentiality for movement - the self's ‘power for action'. Based on recent empirical evidence, we then propose a connection between the implicit bodily self-experience and important psychopathological aspects of schizophrenia by showing that schizophrenic patients exhibit a disruption of implicit bodily self-knowledge. We propose that the bodily nature of the implicitly experiencing self might enable the continuum of experience along which all visions of the world are located - both in healthy and psychotic individuals. The power for action might provide the possibility to give form to the bodily presence characterizing in the first place our being selves.

Psychopathology of the Bodily Self and the Brain: The Case of Schizophrenia

“…As argued elsewhere [64], we believe that the potentiality for action our bodies normally instantiate might provide the core nucleus enabling to give form to the bodily presence characterizing a competent self-other relationship. The enigmatic nature of the world, particularly of the world of others, betrays the impossibility for schizophrenic patients to ground it into their defective bodily presence.…”

“…Given that the vPMC appears to be hypofunctional as well as negatively correlated with self-experience disturbances in schizophrenia [55], and since it has been demonstrated that patients show a defective implicit sense of their bodily self [53], we hypothesize that the defective anticipatory touch displayed by schizophrenic patients as demonstrated by the study of Ferri et al [56] might share the same premotor origin [64]. …”

Mirroring the Self: Testing Neurophysiological Correlates of Disturbed Self-Experience in Schizophrenia Spectrum

“…Thus, any deficits in somatosensory feedback (e.g. a lack of facial motor resonance in response to positive emotional stimuli) plus a selective bias toward the ‘single-sensory' modalities as found in our study would function as a ‘sensory vacuum' that may undermine the perceived bodily self [40,67]. We are thus inclined to consider the SzSp alterations in facial motor resonance to Audio-Video emotional stimuli as a proxy of such liability for multisensory disintegration (in the current paradigm: impairment in Audio-Video integration).…”

“…According to this view, subtle distortions of these embodied mediating processes would be a crucial feature of schizophrenia, which - indeed - has been phenomenologically reconceptualized by Fuchs [39 ]as a disorder of embodied intersubjectivity [40]. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate whether a direct connection between congruent motor facial mimicry in response to emotional stimuli and anomalous subjective experiences (i.e.…”

Neuroscience and Psychopathology

“…Such a goal can be fulfilled only by integrating the scientific study of psychic diseases against a theoretical background focused on human experience [2,3]. However, most of contemporary psychiatry seems to have lost sight of the patients' experiential dimension.…”