What Is It like to Be a Person with Schizophrenia in the Social World? A First-Person Perspective Study on Schizophrenic Dissociality – Part 1: State of the Art

Abstract

This is a critical review of research on the subjective experience of social dysfunction in persons with schizophrenia. Studies from the phenomenological and cognitive paradigms are examined, and significant outcomes and shortcomings are pointed out. Clinical phenomenologists have mainly interpreted schizophrenic dissociality as an anomaly of prereflexive attunement. The main shortcoming of phenomenological research is that it lacks adequate methodology to collect reliable data since most studies are based on the analysis of a few typical cases. Cognitivism has reliably documented disorders of social functioning in large-scale experimental studies. The main shortcoming of most cognitive paradigms is that they do not properly investigate the personal level of experience in real-world functioning. We conclude that there is a need to reliably collect data through quantitative as well as qualitative methodology as established and accepted by the scientific community in the area of schizophrenic dissociality, reflecting the subjective experiences of people with schizophrenia in the real world.

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

“…According to this approach, the coherence between such heterogeneous symptoms can be caught only if their common bodily roots are deemed [43]. Furthermore, the loss of the implicit functioning of the body in everyday life would lead also to the inability to interrelate with others [41,44]. It has been proposed that social dysfunctions in schizophrenic patients would primarily spring from disturbances of bodily self-experience [40,45,46] rather than primarily concerning the intersubjective domain.…”

What Is It like to Be a Person with Schizophrenia in the Social World? A First-Person Perspective Study on Schizophrenic Dissociality – Part 2: Methodological Issues and Empirical Findings

“…In the companion, theoretical paper [1] , studies from the cognitive and phenomenological paradigms on schizophrenic social dysfunction were examined, and significant outcomes as well as shortcomings pointed out. We argued that cognitivism has contributed robust and well-replicated data on disorders of social cognition in persons with schizophrenia.…”

Other Persons: On the Phenomenology of Interpersonal Experience in Schizophrenia (Ancillary Article to EAWE Domain 3)

“…They may engage in a sort of empirical study into others' transactions meant to discover an explicit algorithm to make sense of others' behavior. This algorithmic conceptualization of social life can be defined as an observational or ethological attitude aimed at providing an explicit personal method or algorithm for taking part in social transactions [6,7,33] (EAWE 3.3, Alienated/intellectual strategies for understanding others). This alienated strategy can be considered to be secondary cognitive forms of compensation that are adopted largely in response to disordered emotional attunement.…”

“…Whereas clinical phenomenology focuses on the subjective/personal dimension of this disturbance, general psychiatry concentrates on more general and putatively “objective” dimensions of psychopathological syndromes. There are three main limitations to the concept of “social dysfunction” as standardly defined by conventional psychiatry: (1) it endorses a strictly behavioral-functionalist perspective in which deficits in social behavior are emphasized; (2) these deficits are mainly defined and assessed in quantitative reduction of performance; and (3) it encompasses too many heterogeneous domains of life, e.g., everyday functioning, social contacts, education, occupation, and consequences of stigmatization [6,7]. The main shortcoming of most studies on social dysfunction in schizophrenia reflects these limitations, since they do not give sufficient consideration to the personal level of experience in real-world functioning.…”