Subtitled ‘philosophical and psychopathological perspective on self-experience’, this collection of essays is part of a renaissance of philosophical interest in psychopathology. An increasing number of psychiatrists, cognitive scientists and philosophers (from both the analytic and phenomenological schools) are converging on a common set of questions: what is the nature of the self? How is the self, and self-experience, disrupted in psychopathology? How can we understand psychopathologies? (For another collection of essays on psychopathology from a philosophical perspective see Pathologies of Belief, ed. M. Coltheart and M. Davies.)

Exploring the Self opens with an introductory paper by the organizers of the conference on which this volume is based, Josef Parnas and Dan Zahavi. Parnas and Zahavi locate the present discussion in its historical context and highlight critical issues in the dialogue between philosophy and psychopathology. The first clutch of essays, by George Butterworth, Galen Strawson, Dan Zahavi, and Eduard Marbach, focus on a notion that is central to that dialogue, the notion of the self. What is the self? How does it develop? How should it be studied? Although these authors agree that the answers to these questions should be centered on self-experience, they disagree about exactly how the answers should proceed from there.

The next group of essays deal with general aspects of schizophrenia. Josef Parnas provides a phenomenological perspective on schizophrenia, arguing that schizophrenia is fundamentally a disorder of consciousness. In a quite convincing essay, Louis Sass suggests that the distinction between positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia is much more problematic than is commonly realized. Naomi Eilan asks if schizophrenic delusions are comprehensible, or whether we must follow Jaspers and declare such phenomena beyond understanding. Eilan’s piece illustrates just how much light the study of psychopathology can shed on issues that are of central concern to the philosopher of mind.

The third grouping of essays examine a recent account of the schizophrenic delusion of thought insertion, the comparator/efferent model. Schizophrenics with delusions of thought insertion claim that someone else is putting thoughts into their mind. Drawing heavily on the work of Chris Frith and others, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore provides an overview of this model and presents some recent research that supports it. According to the model, when one initiates an action — in this case, a thought — two signals are sent from the thought generating mechanism: one actually generates the thought, the other – the efferent copy – gets sent to a comparator. The comparator is so-called because it compares the efferent copy to feedback it receives from the stream of thought. The claim is that the experience of initiating the action in question is generated when the comparator registers a match between the efferent copy and the feedback it receives. When no such match is produced, no ‘experience of doing’ is generated. The suggestion is that delusions of thought-insertion are caused by some fault with this mechanism of self-monitoring. Shaun Gallagher’s paper is a nice counter-point to Blakemore’s. Gallagher argues that the efference-copy account of thought insertion is unable to account for the disruptions to temporal experience which accompany schizophrenic delusions, and uses Husserl’s analysis of temporality to constructs an alternative model of thought-insertion.

The final three papers in this volume deal with the relationship between schizophrenia and melancholia. John Cutting examines the experiential worlds of the schizophrenic and depressive by contrasting the way in which they put questions to the world. Michael Schwartz and Osborne Wiggins present a detailed description of melancholia, while Giovanni Stanghellini contrasts the melancholic type with the schizotype. I found this section of the volume generally less engaging and rigorous than previous sections.

Overall this is an excellent volume, and is warmly recommended for those with an interest in the intersection between philosophy and psychopathology.

Timothy J. Bayne, Department of Philosophy/Religious Studies, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Categories: Philosophical