Psychopathology of schizophrenia is presented as a core issue for an enactive theory that is confronted by non-sense. The core disturbance of schizophrenia has been recently identified with disembodiment: a lack, or weakening, of sensory-motor self-awareness. The problem of the transition from prodromal disembodiment to acute schizophrenic symptoms (hallucinations and delusions) is discussed. A phenomenological psychology of imagination turns out to be necessary to explain this transition and to conceive of schizophrenic delusion as reified imaginings unchallengeable by perception. The enactive approach to the psychopathology of schizophrenia shows that there can be no radical experience of non-sense without imagination, but also that imagination is a crucial faculty to make sense of non-sense in embodied and embedded psychotherapies.

Excerpt: The mutual interest between embodied cognitive sciences, in particular enactivism, and phenomenological psychopathology has significantly increased in the last 15 years (Colombetti, 2013; Dibitonto, 2014; Fuchs, 2009; Fuchs, Sattel, & Henningsen, 2010; Parnas et al., 2011; Sass & Parnas, 2003, 2007; Sass, Parnas, Zahavi, 2011; Stanghellini, 2004). Gipps’s article contributes to this field of research by defining ego boundaries in an enactivist framework to explain how the distinction self-other emerges and is maintained in ordinary healthy conditions, and how it is weakened and impaired in cases of schizophrenia. Gipps’s first tenet is: The ego-boundary is enacted equiprimordially with experience, that is, it coarises with the self’s perception of its world. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a mere part of experience, as it is rather its condition of possibility: the ego-boundary is a formal and transcendental (i.e. structural and constitutive) aspect of experi ence. The corresponding schizophrenia-tenet is: schizophrenic disturbances of the ego-boundary are disturbances of alterity: primary disturbances of the very constitution of the self as it arises in defining itself in contradistinction to a perceived other or to a perceived environment. The enactivist account is then presented as an ontological account, describing biologically existing phenomena that are, as such, naturalistically investigable – in contrast to the mainstream epistemological account that considers schizophrenia as a theoretical construct. For example, instead of regarding voice-hearing or thought insertion as failures in self-awareness (in the form of a mistaken inference: “I am not aware of being the author of this piece of inner mulling, therefore it must be ego alien”), the enactivist account regards such phenomena as truly and originally ego-alien, as constituted ab initio as non-ego. According to Gipps, subjective feelings of ‘ontological insecurity’ (Laing, 1959), such as “I cannot know whether I exist” (Hesnard, 1909), thus correspond to a de facto disordered constitution of the ego-boundary.