- International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry
- Preface
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry
- Contributors
- Reference
- The Next Hundred Years: Watching our Ps and Q
- Introduction: History
- The Insanity Defense as a History of Mental Disorder
- Mental Health as Moral Virtue: Some Ancient Arguments
- Aristotle, Plato, and the Anti-Psychiatrists: Comment on Irwin
- Wilhelm Griesinger: Philosophy as the Origin of a New Psychiatry
- The Philosophical Roots of Karl Jaspers’ <i>General Psychopathology</i>
- From Madness to Mental Illness: Psychiatry and Biopolitics in Michel Foucault
- The Epistemological Value of Depression Memoirs: A Meta-Analysis
- Introduction: Contexts of Care
- Challenges to the Modernist Identity of Psychiatry: User Empowerment and Recovery
- Race and Gender in Philosophy of Psychiatry: Science, Relativism, and Phenomenology
- Why Psychiatry Should Fear Medicalization
- Technology and Psychiatry
- Cure and Recovery
- Introduction: Establishing Relationships
- Varieties of Self-Awareness
- Interpersonal Relating
- Intersubjectivity and Psychopathology
- Other Minds, Autism, and Depth in Human Interaction
- Empathic Foundations of Clinical Knowledge
- Discourse and Diseases of the Psyche
- Philosophical Resources for the Psychiatric Interview
- Introduction: Summoning Concepts
- Naturalist Accounts of Mental Disorder
- Values-Based Practice: Topsy-Turvy Take-Home Messages from Ordinary Language Philosophy (and a Few Next Steps)
- Cognitive Science and Explanations of Psychopathology
- What is Mental Illness?
- Vice and Mental Disorders
- Rationality and Sanity: The Role of Rationality Judgments in Understanding Psychiatric Disorders
- Boundary Problems: Negotiating the Challenges of Responsibility and Loss
- Ordering Disorder: Mental Disorder, Brain Disorder, and Therapeutic Intervention
- Mental Disorder: Can Merleau-Ponty Take Us Beyond the “Mind–Brain” Problem?
- Introduction: Descriptive Psychopathology
- Anxiety and Phobias: Phenomenologies, Concepts, Explanations
- Depression and the Phenomenology of Free Will
- Body Image Disorders
- The Phenomenology of Affectivity
- Delusion: The Phenomenological Approach
- Thought Insertion, Self-Awareness, and Rationality
- The Disunity of Consciousness in Psychiatric Disorders
- Delusion: Cognitive Approaches—Bayesian Inference and Compartmentalization
- Introduction: Assessment and Diagnostic Categories
- Mapping the Domain of Mental Illness
- Values in Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification
- Conceptual and Ethical Issues in the Prodromal Phase of Psychosis
- Understanding Mania and Depression
- Autism and the Philosophy of Mind
- Dementia is Dead, Long Live Ageing: Philosophy and Practice in Connection with “Dementia”
- What is Addiction?
- Identity and Addiction: What Alcoholic Memoirs Teach
- Personality Disorder and Validity: A History of Controversy
- Personal Identity and Identity Disorders
- Introduction: Explanation and Understanding
- Causation and Mechanisms in Psychiatry
- Natural Kinds
- The Medical Model and the Philosophy of Science
- Reliability, Validity, and the Mixed Blessings of Operationalism
- Reduction and Reductionism in Psychiatry
- Diagnostic Prediction and Prognosis: Getting from Symptom to Treatment
- Clinical Judgment, Tacit Knowledge, and Recognition in Psychiatric Diagnosis
- Neural Mechanisms of Decision-Making and the Personal Level
- Psychopathology and the Enactive Mind
- Could Psychoanalysis be a Science?
- Introduction: Cure and Care
- Responsibility without Blame: Philosophical Reflections on Clinical Practice
- Depression, Decisional Capacity, and Personal Autonomy
- Psychopharmacology and the Self
- Practical Neuropsychiatric Ethics
- Placebo Effects in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
- Being Unconscious: Heidegger and Freud
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy: A Philosophical Appraisal
- Understanding and Healing: Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in the Era of Neuroscience
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter offers an overview of the phenomenological approach to delusions, emphasizing what Karl Jaspers called the "true delusions" of schizophrenia. Phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the experience of delusions and the delusional world. Several features of this approach are surveyed, including emphasis on formal qualities of subjective life (e.g., mutations of time, space, causality, self-experience, or sense of reality) and questioning of standard assumptions about delusions as erroneous belief (the traditional doxastic view, or "poor reality-testing" formula). The altered modalities of world-oriented and self-oriented experience that precede and ground delusions in schizophrenia, especially the experiences of revelation that Klaus Conrad termed the outer and inner apophany, are then discussed. The chapter first considers the famous "delusional mood" (feelings of strangeness and tension, and a sense of tantalizing yet ineffable meaning ), then the role of ipseity-disturbance (altered minimal or core self, of the basic, pre-reflective sense of existing as a unified and vital subject of experience). In both cases it is explained how delusions can develop out of these distinctive alterations of perception and feeling. The classic question of the understandability or comprehensibility of schizophrenic delusion, together with the related issues of wish-fulfillment and rationalizing motives are then considered. The chapter addresses the crucial but neglected issue of the felt reality-status of delusions or the delusional world, discussing derealization, "double bookkeeping" (in which the patient experiences delusional reality as existing in a different ontological domain from everyday reality), and "double exposure" (merging of two perspectives on reality, with the potential for confusion this implies). The chapter concludes by discussing delusions typically found in paranoid and affective psychoses, and monothematic delusions found in certain organic conditions.
Keywords: delusions, phenomenology, schizophrenia, delusional mood, apophany, self-disturbance, double-bookkeeping, Klaus Conrad, incomprehensibility, affective psychosis, paranoia, monothematic delusions
Louis A. Sass, Department of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University.
Elizabeth Pienkos, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry
- Preface
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry
- Contributors
- Reference
- The Next Hundred Years: Watching our Ps and Q
- Introduction: History
- The Insanity Defense as a History of Mental Disorder
- Mental Health as Moral Virtue: Some Ancient Arguments
- Aristotle, Plato, and the Anti-Psychiatrists: Comment on Irwin
- Wilhelm Griesinger: Philosophy as the Origin of a New Psychiatry
- The Philosophical Roots of Karl Jaspers’ <i>General Psychopathology</i>
- From Madness to Mental Illness: Psychiatry and Biopolitics in Michel Foucault
- The Epistemological Value of Depression Memoirs: A Meta-Analysis
- Introduction: Contexts of Care
- Challenges to the Modernist Identity of Psychiatry: User Empowerment and Recovery
- Race and Gender in Philosophy of Psychiatry: Science, Relativism, and Phenomenology
- Why Psychiatry Should Fear Medicalization
- Technology and Psychiatry
- Cure and Recovery
- Introduction: Establishing Relationships
- Varieties of Self-Awareness
- Interpersonal Relating
- Intersubjectivity and Psychopathology
- Other Minds, Autism, and Depth in Human Interaction
- Empathic Foundations of Clinical Knowledge
- Discourse and Diseases of the Psyche
- Philosophical Resources for the Psychiatric Interview
- Introduction: Summoning Concepts
- Naturalist Accounts of Mental Disorder
- Values-Based Practice: Topsy-Turvy Take-Home Messages from Ordinary Language Philosophy (and a Few Next Steps)
- Cognitive Science and Explanations of Psychopathology
- What is Mental Illness?
- Vice and Mental Disorders
- Rationality and Sanity: The Role of Rationality Judgments in Understanding Psychiatric Disorders
- Boundary Problems: Negotiating the Challenges of Responsibility and Loss
- Ordering Disorder: Mental Disorder, Brain Disorder, and Therapeutic Intervention
- Mental Disorder: Can Merleau-Ponty Take Us Beyond the “Mind–Brain” Problem?
- Introduction: Descriptive Psychopathology
- Anxiety and Phobias: Phenomenologies, Concepts, Explanations
- Depression and the Phenomenology of Free Will
- Body Image Disorders
- The Phenomenology of Affectivity
- Delusion: The Phenomenological Approach
- Thought Insertion, Self-Awareness, and Rationality
- The Disunity of Consciousness in Psychiatric Disorders
- Delusion: Cognitive Approaches—Bayesian Inference and Compartmentalization
- Introduction: Assessment and Diagnostic Categories
- Mapping the Domain of Mental Illness
- Values in Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification
- Conceptual and Ethical Issues in the Prodromal Phase of Psychosis
- Understanding Mania and Depression
- Autism and the Philosophy of Mind
- Dementia is Dead, Long Live Ageing: Philosophy and Practice in Connection with “Dementia”
- What is Addiction?
- Identity and Addiction: What Alcoholic Memoirs Teach
- Personality Disorder and Validity: A History of Controversy
- Personal Identity and Identity Disorders
- Introduction: Explanation and Understanding
- Causation and Mechanisms in Psychiatry
- Natural Kinds
- The Medical Model and the Philosophy of Science
- Reliability, Validity, and the Mixed Blessings of Operationalism
- Reduction and Reductionism in Psychiatry
- Diagnostic Prediction and Prognosis: Getting from Symptom to Treatment
- Clinical Judgment, Tacit Knowledge, and Recognition in Psychiatric Diagnosis
- Neural Mechanisms of Decision-Making and the Personal Level
- Psychopathology and the Enactive Mind
- Could Psychoanalysis be a Science?
- Introduction: Cure and Care
- Responsibility without Blame: Philosophical Reflections on Clinical Practice
- Depression, Decisional Capacity, and Personal Autonomy
- Psychopharmacology and the Self
- Practical Neuropsychiatric Ethics
- Placebo Effects in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
- Being Unconscious: Heidegger and Freud
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy: A Philosophical Appraisal
- Understanding and Healing: Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in the Era of Neuroscience
- Author Index
- Subject Index