Abstract
In this chapter, I analyse the concept of schizophrenia as an anomalous experience of the self; as a disorder of ipseity. I outline three phenomenological accounts of ipseity: Michel Henry’s solipsistic account, the account of ipseity as a “width of presence” given by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and ipseity as an enchainment to existence in Levinas’s early work. My argument is that ipseity is neither immediate nor undifferentiated and that pre-reflective experience harbours an essential fragility and vulnerability that can sow the seeds for the possibility of madness.
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Notes
- 1.
For his famous work on affordances, see Gibson (1986).
- 2.
Husserl (1970: 575) writes of this anonymous form of existence as a “rustling”, a term that Levinas uses just after the passages cited. Husserl writes of the “idea we have when ‘something’ stirs, when there is a rustling, a ring at the door, an idea had before we give it verbal expression, has indeterminateness of direction … an ‘indeterminate something’”.
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Morgan, A. (2022). Ipseity. In: Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09334-0_6
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