Schizophrenia: a pathology of consciousness?

This study of consciousness in schizophrenia makes an original return to the work of the great French psychiatrist Henri Ey. Ey saw schizophrenia as a pathology of consciousness; arguing that “the madman has no consciousness of his madness”, Ey understands mental illness as affecting the individual’s liberty and identity, as well as having consequences on the level of social skills. The author pinpoints the great present-day relevance of this conception, allowing the latest research in cognitive neuropsychology to revive these much too quickly forgotten texts. In his valuable conceptualization of the study of the problems of consciousness in schizophrenia, Jean-Marie Danion’s model shows that the difficulties the schizophrenic experiences on the level of autonoetic conscience are central to the manifestations of the disease. This is a true alternative to Nancy Andreasen’s model, which conceives of schizophrenia as a condition of cognitive asymmetry. Autonoetic consciousness is defined as a particular state of consciousness in which a subject’s conscious recollection of an event calls up a memory by directly evoking the experience of receiving the information with which the subject was confronted in the past. For example, if in remembering the details of a precise context, such as meeting a person whom we have only known for a short time, we are able to recall the person's name, profession and the circumstances of our last encounter, we are able to employ our autonoetic memory. In the opposite case, if we encounter the person and recall neither her name, nor her profession or the details of when we have last seen her, but we only have a feeling of familiarity, we are not using our autonoetic consciousness. This type of so-called “first person” experimental approach, as opposed to earlier “third person” approaches, is characterized by the fact that the experimenter no longer inserts himself in third person into the experience to which a test subject is submitted but tries to objectively evaluate subjective experience.