Phenomenology of corporeality. A paradigmatic case study in schizophrenia

Abstract

We discuss the case of a person with schizophrenia who is unable to maintain the upright posture and to stand the other’s look and whose subjectivity in not accessible by means of standard methods of interview. To make sense of the patient’s otherwise odd and incomprehensible behavior, we analyze by means of the phenomenological method the clinician’s subjective experiences during the encounter with him. We also contrast the patient’s behaviour with classic essays is phenomenological psychopathology. During the encounter with this patient, a current of forces is produced, not physical but physiognomic. What takes place is a dynamics, involving the lived body of the patient as well as that of the clinician, that jeopardizes the patient’s capacity to maintain the upright posture in front of the other and makes the clinician feel that he overwhelms the patient. The look plays a major importance in this dynamics. Human beings in the upright posture distance themselves through sight from the immediate contact with things and other living beings. The look is probably the most prominent phenomenon of the expressive body that allows distance, prevision, decision and reflection, rather than leaving us at the mercy of the other. We speculate that the patient’s loss of the upright posture and his incapacity to contrast with his look the objectifying power of the look of the other are the two origins of an embodied, existential chiasm at the heart of the schizophrenic form of life.