TOWARDS A HUSSERLIAN PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ONSET OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

Husserl's phenomenology provides basic concepts of normal mental life in the light of which schizophrenic experience can be better understoo d. Husserl's distinction of intentional syntheses into automatic (pass ive) and active kinds leads to a further distinction between an indivi dual mental life as a whole and the ego who lives and acts in that men tal life. Relevant here in Husserl's phenomenology of the synthetic un ification of mental life itself that is automatically achieved through inner temporality (Zeitbewusstsein). These notions will allow us to c larify further the profound disturbances of self and world which are s o frequently encountered in schizophrenia. The earliest phase of schiz ophrenia, the phase of the ''delusional mood'', is then explicated in Husserlian terms. Pervasive in this phase is a severe weakening of the normal intentive syntheses of mental life. The self of the schizophre nic experiences itself as at the center of a bewildering, confusing, a nd dubious transformation of itself and of its world. The unity of the self splinters, and the identity of objects and the networks among ob jects grow disordered. The most basic factures of the world and of the self become deeply strange and opaque. Because the syntheses which co nstitute a continuous and unitary self have become seriously weakened, the self disintegrates add begins to be experienced as conjoined with aspects of the non-self. The automatic processes of mental life no lo nger sufficiently constitute wordly objects or the self, and thus the ego must actively thematize and devote itself to topics that could nor mally be taken for granted. This need to actively (egoically) constitu te what could normally be passively (non-egoically) constituted finall y overwhelms the: ego. The ego thus grows extremely weak or withdraws into its own self-constituted world, or both. Finally we discuss the c onative dysfunction of the ego it experiences its own strivings and pr ojects as determined less by itself and more by the ''other'', the non -ego - whether this determining ''other'' be a thing or a person.