Self, Self-disorder and being-in-the-world

Abstract

It is said that the fundamental disturbance of schizophrenia is a disturbance of the self or a self-disorder. But what does it mean? To what extent can the self be altered? What is the self? To answer these questions, we must first get rid of the ego or the self as the substantial core of the subject. Thanks to Vincent Carraud, we know now that the ego as a noun is an invention of the philosophy, beginning with Descartes and continuing with Kant, Fichte and Husserl. Thank to Sartre’s essay on the transcendence of the ego, the ego no longer appears as an inhabitant of consciousness and the self as such, unlike the ego, is the first and non-substantial structure of consciousness, called by Sartre the for-itself. This raises the question whether this fundamental structure could be altered in certain forms of madness. Our thesis could be expressed as follow: even in delusion, the consciousness remains an intentional self-consciousness and the human being a being-in-the world. This would therefore mean that, if there are disorders of subjective experience there is, strictly speaking, no possible self-disorder or self-disturbance in schizophrenia.