Schizophrenia and alterations in the experience of self and agency: Comparisons of dialogical and phenomenological views

Abstract

Contemporary researchers have tended to present dysfunction in schizophrenia as the result of biological and social forces. While this has greatly advanced our knowledge, we are still without a full account of the illness’s first-person dimensions. A richer first-person account explains that schizophrenia is a disorder that interrupts the lives of people who must continue to struggle to find and create security and meaning. A range of literature has explored in many directions how schizophrenia is linked to profound changes in self-experience; however, there have not been systematic explorations of the ways in which these views converge and diverge. In response we will explore two different models of the processes which underlie a particular self-experience linked with schizophrenia: experiences of diminished agency. We will present a dialogical model of disturbances in agency and then compare and contrast it with another prominent philosophically based model, one from phenomenology.