Autobiography of a schizophrenic girl: Reality lost and gained, with analytic interpretation.

Sechehaye, Marguerite; Rubin-Rabson, Grace

doi:10.1037/11511-000

Cited by 45 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…Sass explains that the patient does not act on the delusions and hallucinations because they are "felt by the patient to exist only 'in the mind's eye," that is, what Sass calls the hyper-reflexivity of "an Apollonian illness." Citing Sechehaye's Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl [ 91 ]), Sass [ 90 ] defines this Apollonian illness: "... many schizophrenic patients describe the world of psychosis as a place not of darkness but of relentless light - light being the natural metaphor for conscious awareness... [and then citing Sechehaye] 'where reign(s) an implacable light, blinding, leaving no place for shadow,'" p. 117 (my insertion). Sass writes: "In my view, the experience of many schizophrenic patients involves not an overwhelming by but a detachment from normal forms emotion and desire, not a loss but an exacerbation of various forms of self-conscious awareness" [ 90 ], p. 12.…”

Section: Operative Hyper-reflexivity and The Myth Of The Apollonianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain: hypnagogic vs. hyper-reflexive models of disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states

Mishara

2010

Philos Ethics Humanit Med

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Kafka's writings are frequently interpreted as representing the historical period of modernism in which he was writing. Little attention has been paid, however, to the possibility that his writings may reflect neural mechanisms in the processing of self during hypnagogic (i.e., between waking and sleep) states. Kafka suffered from dream-like, hypnagogic hallucinations during a sleep-deprived state while writing. This paper discusses reasons (phenomenological and neurobiological) why the self projects an imaginary double (autoscopy) in its spontaneous hallucinations and how Kafka's writings help to elucidate the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. I further discuss how the proposed mechanisms may be relevant to understanding paranoid delusions in schizophrenia. Literature documents and records cognitive and neural processes of self with an intimacy that may be otherwise unavailable to neuroscience. To elucidate this approach, I contrast it with the apparently popularizing view that the symptoms of schizophrenia result from what has been called an operative (i.e., pre-reflective) hyper-reflexivity. The latter approach claims that pre-reflective self-awareness (diminished in schizophrenia) pervades all conscious experience (however, in a manner that remains unverifiable for both phenomenological and experimental methods). This contribution argues the opposite: the "self" informs our hypnagogic imagery precisely to the extent that we are not self-aware.

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Section: Operative Hyper-reflexivity and The Myth Of The Apollonianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain: hypnagogic vs. hyper-reflexive models of disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states

Mishara

2010

Philos Ethics Humanit Med

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“…I heard them without hearing them, and recognized that they arose within me. (Sechehaye, 1970, p. 59) Descriptions like this again suggest a kind of experience that does not fit neatly into established intentional state categories. Indeed, J.H.…”

Section: Verbal Hallucinations and Inserted Thoughtsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…I heard them without hearing them, and recognized that they arose within me. (Sechehaye, 1970, p. 59)…”

Section: Verbal Hallucinations and Inserted Thoughtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thought Insertion Clarified

Ratcliffe¹,

Wilkinson²

2017

Real Hallucinations

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Abstract'Thought insertion' in schizophrenia involves somehow experiencing one's own thoughts as someone else's. Some philosophers try to make sense of this by distinguishing between ownership and agency: one still experiences oneself as the owner of an inserted thought but attributes it to another agency. In this paper, we propose that thought insertion involves experiencing thought contents as alien, rather than episodes of thinking. To make our case, we compare thought insertion to certain experiences of 'verbal hallucination' and show that they amount to different descriptions of the same phenomenon: a quasi-perceptual experience of thought content. We add that the agency/ownership distinction is unhelpful here. What requires explanation is not why a person experiences a type of intentional state without the usual sense of agency, but why she experiences herself as the agent of one type of intentional state rather than another. We conclude by sketching an account of how this might happen.

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“…There seems to be a movement from the representation of schizophrenia as an emotional, stormy, and impulsive condition of the individual to a set of spatial images describing schizophrenia as a foreign country, another world or a parallel reality. These spatial metaphors appeared in two books (amongst others) by Margaret Sechehaye and Renee (Sechehaye 1951a), and Joanne Greenberg (Greenberg 1964).…”

Section: Madness As a "Land Of Light"mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Mind Trying to Right/Write Itself: Metaphors in Madness Narratives

Elran¹

2019

Humanities

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This article explores autobiographical madness narratives written by people with lived experience of psychosis, dated from the mid-19th century until the 1970s. The focus of the exploration is on the metaphors used in these narratives in order to communicate how the writers experienced and understood madness from within. Different metaphors of madness, such as going out of one’s mind, madness as an inner beast, another world, or a transformative journey are presented based on several autobiographical books. It is argued that these metaphors often represent madness as the negative picture of what it is to be human, while the narrative writing itself helps to restore a sense of belonging and personhood. The value and function of metaphors in illness and madness narratives is further discussed.

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Autobiography of a schizophrenic girl: Reality lost and gained, with analytic interpretation.

Cited by 45 publications

References 0 publications

Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain: hypnagogic vs. hyper-reflexive models of disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states

Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain: hypnagogic vs. hyper-reflexive models of disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states

Thought Insertion Clarified

A Mind Trying to Right/Write Itself: Metaphors in Madness Narratives

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