Schizophrenia, the Very Idea—with Reflections on Hyperreflexivity

* This event will be held online via Zoom.

Schizophrenia, the Very Idea—with Reflections on Hyperreflexivity

The purpose of this talk (based on a recent paper by Sass & Feyaerts, 2024) will be to consider schizophrenia—the very idea—from the perspective of phenomenological psychopathology, with special attention to 1, the problematic nature of the diagnostic concept, 2, the prospect and challenges inherent in focusing on subjective experience, and 3, the advantages of a revised version of the well-known basic-self or ipseity-disturbance model (IDMrevised). Particular attention is paid to the key concept of hyperreflexivity—a form of exaggerated self-awareness that tends to undermine normal world-directedness and the stability of self-experience. Professor Sass will consider forms of exaggerated “self-presence” that are sometimes neglected, yet imbue classically schizophrenic experiences involving quasi-solipsism or ontological paranoia.

The revised model aims to respect the heterogeneous, indeed paradoxical aspects of schizophrenia while also capturing the “specific mental totality” of schizophrenia or schizophrenia spectrum, and also the “kernel of truth not present with other [diagnostic] groupings” (Karl Jaspers). The paper is highly encompassing and, in this sense, ambitious. It is, however, also modest in its acknowledgment (though also its justification) of various forms of ambiguity or obscurity that attend the model—some of these pertaining to the difficult nature of the study of subjectivity, others to the notion of hyperreflexivity in particular.

SEE: Sass, L. & Feyaerts, J. (2024). Schizophrenia: the very idea: On self disorder, hyperreflexivity, and the diagnostic concept.” Schizophrenia Research, 267: 473-486.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2024.03.022

Speaker

Louis Sass, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP), at Rutgers University, where he is also affiliated with the Comparative Literature Program and the Center for Cognitive Science.

Professor Sass has published extensively on schizophrenia, phenomenological psychopathology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and the thought of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault—as well as on modernism/postmodernism and other cultural issues. He is the author of Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought and of The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind. A revised edition of Madness and Modernism, published by Oxford University Press, was awarded the BMA: British Medical Association First Prize as best book in the field of psychiatry for 2018.

Professor Sass has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Foundation, and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ. He has long been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a research associate at the Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, at Weill Cornell Medical College. Sass has been a visiting professor, in psychology or philosophy, at the Universities of Chicago, Paris, Oviedo (Spain), Colombia (Bogotá), and Michoacán (Mexico).

In 2010, Professor Sass received the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation (for transformative contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychology). In 2020, he received the Sarton Medal in psychology from the University of Ghent, Belgium as well as the Award for Distinguished Contribution to Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology from the Society of Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology (American Psychological Association).

The event will be recorded.

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