No abstract

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a complex condition marked by heterogeneity. People with BPD have a profusion of symptoms spread across various levels of lived experience, such as identity, affectivity, and interpersonal relationships. Researchers and clinicians have often resorted to the structuring concept of Self to organize the fragmentation of their experience at the identity level. Notably, using the concept of the narrative self, Fuchs proposed to interpret BPD as a fragmentation of narrative identity. This interpretation of BPD, widely shared, has been challenged by Gold and Kyratsous, who have proposed a complementary understanding of the self through the idea of agency, and to which Schmidt and Fuchs in turn have countered. This article proposes to contribute to this discussion from a phenomenological perspective. First, we will briefly review the discussions around narrative interpretation of BPD. From the problems left unresolved by the discussion, we will then justify the necessity to proceed with a stratification of the self from a phenomenology method. Third, from the thought of the Hungarian phenomenologist László Tengelyi, we will continue with an archaeology of the self, in three layers – self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self – integrating Schmidt and Fuchs’ concepts of self, in addition to those of Gold and Kyratsous, but also, to a lesser extent, those of Dan Zahavi. Finally, we will proceed with a phenomenological reconfiguration of the experiences and manifestations associated with the identity axis of BPD.

This paper aims at a phenomenological analysis of trust. We argue that trust has a transcendental dimension in that it functions as a condition of possibility of the basic ego-world relation. Tacit for the most part in ordinary experience, it comes forth in its problematicity in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. People experiencing psychic disturbances lose trust in the continuity and the mineness of lived experience and conceive the world as uninhabitable. In order to address the transcendental problem of trust, we first carry out a static analysis of trust as perceptual faith and we show that it is founded in the functioning of a transcendental ground. In a second step, we proceed with a genetic analysis drawing on Husserl's manuscripts on the awakening of the self, on early childhood, and Richir's recent phenomenological readings of D. W. Winnicott. We situate the archaic experience of trust in an originarily intersubjective and affective dimension, where the parental environment functions as a transcendental matrix for the early development of a yet inchoative self. By doing so, we aim to sketch out the major lines of a transcendental history of trust in the early stages of human experience.

Anomalies of imagination are frequent and handicapping in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) but neglected in psychopathology due to the lack of a conceptual framework to model disorders of imagination. Recently, the link between minimal self disorders and pathology of imagination has been emphasized. The aim of the present article is to discuss this initiative by stressing their paradigm drawing on the recent imaginary turn in phenomenological research. Although this field of research is currently very active in philosophy, there are very few translational approaches in psychopathology or cognitive sciences. In this paper, we examine how contemporary research concerning fantasy and imagination can lead to the elaboration of an epistemological and phenomenological framework for schizophrenia research. We first examine the psychopathological literature on anomalous fantasy and imagination in SSDs. Then we propose an exhaustive overview of the imaginary turn of philosophical phenomenology. Further, we examine the theoretical and practical implications of such a recasting of phenomenological research. We show how fantasy and imagination are involved in the embodiment process, and how identity and imagination are interlinked. Finally, we propose an overview of the possible implications for the understanding of psychotherapeutic processes and recovery strategies.