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

Objective:This is an empirical study exploring the personal level of experience of social dysfunction in persons with schizophrenia. Method: We adopted a qualitative method of inquiry based on a review of transcripts of individual therapy sessions conducted for 52 persons with chart diagnoses of schizophrenia or schizotypal disorder. Results: In our interviews, the experience of the social world in persons with schizophrenia emerged as an overall crisis of immediate, pre-predicative, prereflexive attunement, typically accompanied by feelings of invasiveness and abnormalities in bodily and emotional sensations; a hyperreflexive mode for understanding the intentions of other persons, and a sceptical, aversive and sometimes utopian attitude towards sociality. Conclusion: Social dysfunction in persons with schizophrenia may reflect a disorder of the process of corporeal identification/differentiation that allows both for the intersubjective understanding through body-to-body attunement and for the demarcation between self and other. Copyright (C) 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel