'Disorders of Thinking as Disorders of Relating: A Phenomenological Understanding of Schizophrenic Thought Disorder'
Schizophrenic thought disorder is often considered to reflect impaired interpersonal understanding. Thus cognitive approaches suggest that a speaker with impaired social understanding fails to tailor the expression of intact thought to the needs of their listeners – giving rise to the mere appearance of ‘thought disorder’. This, however, presupposes the disreputable ‘inner/outer’ picture, deconstructed by Wittgenstein, in which thought and communication are fundamentally separable phenomena. To preserve the twin intuitions that thought disorder is more than appearance, and that it reflects disturbed social understanding, we may draw on Heidegger’s conception of interpersonal relatedness as constitutive of thinking itself. This paper instances the theme that what makes schizophrenic life puzzling is not always something intractable about psychotic phenomena, but rather our disposition to construe non-psychotic life – e.g. the connections between thought, discourse, and human relatedness – in a schizoid fashion.
Date: 7 February 2018, 17:15 (Wednesday, 4th week, Hilary 2018)
Venue: Radcliffe Humanities, Woodstock Road OX2 6GG
Speaker: Richard Gipps
Organiser contact email address: erin.lafford@spc.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Oxford Phenomenology Network
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: John Scholar