Abstract
In recent years, phenomenologically informed philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists have attempted to import philosophical notions associated with the self into the empirical study of pathological (self-)experience. In particular, so-called ipseity disturbances have been put forward as generative of symptoms of schizophrenia, and several attempts have been made to operationalize and measure kinds and degrees of ipseity disturbances in schizophrenia. However, we find that this work faces challenges caused by the fact that (a) the notion of ipseity is used ambiguously, both in the philosophical and in the empirical discussion, and (b) the methods employed to operationalize ipseity often portray a rather different understanding of the notion from that found in the (phenomenological) literature that is cited as providing the philosophical foundation for the studies in question. In particular, according to the definitions found in the philosophical literature, while being phenomenologically available, the self is not represented in ipseity. However, when it comes to the empirical study of ipseity and its disturbances, the object of investigation is often a kind of explicit self-representation. As a result, it is unclear whether different researchers are really talking about the same thing. Future progress in this area will require more careful conceptual distinctions; the present article aims to contribute to this task.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Though notice that Kriegel (2009), in contrast to Zahavi, defends a self-representationalist theory of consciousness.
Moreover, there also seem to be phenomenological reasons to distinguish these notions (see Schear 2009).
However, notice that even when it comes to explicit self-representation, that is the explicit, conceptual self-ascription of a mental or bodily state, we can distinguish between thinking about oneself ‘as subject’ and thinking about oneself ‘as object’ (Wittgenstein 1958). An example of the former is the self-ascription of a mental state simply on the basis of being in that very state, without the need for self-identification. The possibility of such a self-ascription is based precisely on the fact that subjects enjoy a special access to their own experiential states. In contrast, when self-ascribing a property on the basis of self-observation (as in seeing oneself in the mirror), the subject takes herself as an object which needs to be identified. The difference between the two can be seen by asking whether it makes sense to ask the question ‘Are you sure it is you?’ (cf. Wittgenstein 1958). For example, if I self-ascribe a headache on the basis of my current experience, it doesn’t make sense to ask ‘Sure, someone is having a headache, but are you certain that it is you?’. The question does not make sense because the self-ascription is not based on a self-identification to begin with, hence the possibility of misidentification does not arise. In contrast, when I self-ascribe the property of wearing a blue sweater on the basis of seeing a self-reflection in the mirror, it is in principle possible that I misidentify the person wearing the sweater (it could be my twin that I am seeing in the mirror, for example). Legrand and others seem to neglect this possibility when they claim that all explicit thinking about oneself is a form of self-objectification (see Musholt 2013 for detailed discussion).
More generally, Zahavi and Legrand reject the representationalist view of consciousness, drawing inspiration from the anti-representationalism of Michel Henry.
From within the analytic tradition, a similar argument can be found in Shoemaker (1994).
See also Billon and Kriegel (2015).
Notice that in the area of the neuroscientific study of self-consciousness more generally, conflations that are related to those identified in the following also abound. In particular, these studies also often do not distinguish between the pre-reflective and the reflective sense of self-consciousness (for a discussion see Christoff et al. 2011 and Musholt 2013). However, here we focus on those studies that make explicit reference to the phenomenological literature and to the notion of ipseity with the aim of uncovering certain inconsistencies that seem to occur specifically when this phenomenological terminology is applied to empirical research.
Note that this quotation is characteristic of depersonalization, which is a symptom of schizophrenia that can also occur outside of schizophrenia.
The sense of agency refers to the sense of initiating and/or controlling a thought or action. In contrast, the sense of ownership refers to the sense that it is one’s own body that is moving (Gallagher 2000); for more detail see discussion further below.
The focus on a disturbed sense of body ownership and agency in empirical studies of schizophrenia is also confirmed by a recent meta-analysis by Hur et al. (2014) involving 25 different studies.
Also see Billon (2015), who suggests that agency might reduce to the mineness of intentions-in-action and thus be a form a ipseity.
At the very least, we cannot assume that a sense of agency is part of all conscious experience without further argument. (One such argument might be that agency grounds mineness [see Bermúdez, forthcoming]. However, there seems to be a tension between this claim and the claim that agency reduces to mineness).
Legrand (2007a, pp.595-597) argues that the basis of self-recognition and perceiving oneself as agent is a form of pre-reflective self-consciousness. In particular, on her view, self-recognition is dependent on self-related processing that does not represent the self, specifically re-afferences (i.e. changes in perceptual feedback due to one’s own action). However, while pre-reflective self-consciousness might be necessary for self-recognition, it is not sufficient. After all, re-afferences are used extensively throughout the animal kingdom to control action (Webb 2004), by most organisms not capable of self-recognition. The extra ingredient for self-recognition is self-representation (including the representation of oneself that is constructed from re-afference). Thus, tasks of self-recognition cannot be interpreted purely in terms of re-afference and performance differences might well be due to factors other than impairments in self-related processing.
References
Baker, L.R. 2013. Naturalism and the first-person perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bermúdez, J.L. 1998. The paradox of self consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bermúdez, J.L. (forthcoming). Bodily ownership, psychological ownership, and psychopathology. Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
Billon, A. 2015. Why are we certain that we exist? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3): 723–759.
Billon, A. & Kriegel, U. (2015). Jaspers' Dilemma: The Psychopathological Challenge to Subjectivity Theories of Consciousness. In R. Gennaro (ed.), Disturbed Consciousness. MIT Press. pp. 29–54.
Blankenburg, W. 1971. Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit. Stuttgart: Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie symptomarmer Schizophrenien.
Christoff, K., Cosmelli, D., Legrand, D., & Thompson, E. 2011. Specifying the self for cognitive neuroscience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (3): 104-112.
Colombetti, G. 2011. Varieties of pre-reflective self-awareness: Foreground and background bodily feelings in emotion experience. Inquiry 54 (3): 293–313.
Conrad, K. 1958. Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns. Stuttgart: G. Thieme
Ferri, F., F. Frassinetti, F. Mastrangelo, A. Salone, F.M. Ferro, and V. Gallese. 2012. Bodily self and schizophrenia: The loss of implicit self-body knowledge. Consciousness and Cognition 21 (3): 1365–1374.
Frank, M. 2002. Self-consciousness and self-knowledge: On some difficulties with the reduction of subjectivity. Constellations 9 (3): 390–408.
Gallagher, S. 2000. Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (1): 14–21.
Guillot, M. 2017. I me mine: On a confusion concerning the subjective character of experience. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8: 23–53.
Hur, J.W., J.S. Kwon, T.Y. Lee, and S. Park. 2014. The crisis of minimal self-awareness in schizophrenia: A meta-analytic review. Schizophrenia Research 152 (1): 58–64.
Juckel, G., L.A. Sass, and A. Heinz. 2003. Anhedonia, self-experience in schizophrenia and implications for treatment. Pharmacopsychiatry 36 (3): 176–180.
Kriegel, U. 2009. Subjective consciousness: A self-representational theory. Oxford University Press UK.
Legrand, D. 2007a. Pre-reflective self-as-subject from experiential and empirical perspectives. Consciousness and Cognition 16: 583–599.
Legrand, D. 2007b. Pre-reflective self-consciousness: On being bodily in the world. In Janus Head, 9 (2), 493–519.
Mishara, A. L. 2010. Klaus Conrad (1905–1961): Delusional Mood, Psychosis, and Beginning Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin 36 (1): 9–13.
Musholt, K. 2013. A philosophical perspective on the relation between cortical midline structures and the self. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7: 536.
Musholt, K. 2015. Thinking about oneself: From Nonconceptual content to the concept of a self. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nelson, B., A. Fortino, B.J. Harrison, M. Yucel, L.A. Sass, A.R. Yung, A. Thompson, S.J. Wood, C. Pantelis, and P.D. McGorry. 2009. A disturbed sense of self in the psychosis prodome: Linking phenomenology and neurobiology. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 33: 807–817.
Nelson, B., and L.A. Sass. 2009. Medusa's stare: A case study of working with self-disturbance in the early phase of schizophrenia. Clinical Case Studies 8 (6): 489–504.
Nelson, B., J. Parnas, and L.A. Sass. 2014. Disturbance of minimal self (ipseity) in schizophrenia: Clarification and current status. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40 (3): 479–482.
Nelson, B., Sass, L. A., & Parnas, J. (2016). Basics elf disturbance in the schizophrenia spectrum: a review and future directions. In: M. Kyrios et al. (ed) The Self in Understanding and Treating Psychological Disorders, Cambridge University Press, 158–168.
Parnas, J. and L. A. Sass (2001). Self, solipsism and schizophrenic delusions. In: Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8: 2–3.
Röhricht, F., N. Papadopoulos, I. Suzuki, and S. Priebe. 2009. Ego-pathology, body experience, and body psychotherapy in chronic schizophrenia. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 82 (1): 19–30.
Rulf, S. 2003. Phenomenological contributions on schizophrenia: A critical review and commentary on the literature between 1980-2000. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 34 (1): 1–46.
Sass, L. A., and Parnas, J. (2003). Schizophrenia, consciousness and self. In: Schizophrenia Bulletin 29 (3): 427–444.
Sass, L., J. Parnas, and D. Zahavi. 2011. Phenomenological psychopathology and schizophrenia: Contemporary approaches and misunderstandings. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 18 (1): 1–23.
Sass, L., E. Pienkos, B. Skodlar, G. Stanghellini, T. Fuchs, J. Parnas, and N. Jones. 2017. EAWE: Examination of anomalous world experience. Psychopathology 50: 10–54.
Schear, J.K. 2009. Experience and self-consciousness. Philosophical Studies 144 (1): 95–105.
Stanghellini, G. 2009. Embodiment and schizophrenia. World Psychiatry 8: 56–59.
Taylor, J.G. 2010. A neural model of the loss of self in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin. 37 (6): 1229–1247.
Varga, S. (2012). Non-reflective self-awareness: Towards a ‘situated’ account. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19 (3–4): 164–193.
Webb, B. 2004. Neural mechanisms for prediction: Do insects have forward models? Trends in Neurosciences 27 (5): 278–282.
Wittgenstein, L. 1958. The blue and Brown books. Blackwell Publishers Ltd..
Zahavi, D. 2005. Subjectivity and selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective. MIT Press.
Zahavi, D. 2014. Self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy and shame. Oxford University Press.
Zahavi, D. 2019. Consciousness and (minimal) selfhood: Getting clearer on for-me-ness and mineness. In , ed. U. Kriegel, 1–19. The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford University Press: Oxford. (in press).
Zahavi, D., and U. Kriegel. 2016. For-me-ness: What it is and what it is not. In Philosophy of mind and phenomenology: Conceptual and empirical approaches, ed. D.O. Dahlstrom, A. Elpidorou, and W. Hopp, 36–53. London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Carruthers, G., Musholt, K. Ipseity at the Intersection of Phenomenology, Psychiatry and Philosophy of Mind: Are we Talking about the Same Thing?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 689–701 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0392-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0392-5