Essay Proposal and Annotated Bibligraphy; Phenomenology in Schizophrenia
For my essay, I would like to examine the phenomenology of schizophrenia. Phenomenology is the study of the development of human consciousness and self-awareness. Phenomenology observes unusual people or events as they appear without any further research or explanation. The study is from the first-person point of view meaning that the investigator carries out the study from their own experiences and from living through that experience. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is a major mental disorder of unknown cause that causes one to misunderstand things and imagine unreal things. It creates a separation between the thought processes and the emotions causing a distortion of reality accompanied by delusions and hallucinations. Schizophrenia also causes fragmentation of the personality, motor disturbances, bizarre behavior, often with no loss of essential intellectual functions.
I choose the phenomenology of schizophrenia because it will provide a deeper insight into probable causes of schizophrenia. At present, there are no known causes of the mental disorder, but a more in-depth observation of the development of human consciousness and self-awareness is likely to help one understand how human awareness of an average person gets formed and how different it is from a person who has schizophrenia.
I will be focusing on one main text in particular; Phenomenology, Language & Schizophrenia by Manfred Spitzer, Friedrich Uehlein, Michael A. Schwartz, Christoph Mundt. The book focuses on an attempt to bring specialists from different fields together to integrate various conceptual and empirical approaches for the benefit of schizophrenia research. The goal of the book is to facilitate discussions among members of such diverse fields as psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy. However, this book does not give an explicit overview of phenomenology and schizophrenia as different fields altogether, and as such, I will require other primary and secondary sources to gain more profound knowledge of the essay topic.
Annotated Bibliography
Wong, A. H. C., & Van Tol, H. H. (2003). Schizophrenia: from phenomenology to neurobiology. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 27(3), 269-306.
The paper shows how schizophrenia mental disorder has been studied over time using phenomenology and how recent advances in neuroscience have allowed the confirmation or refutation of earlier findings in schizophrenia. The results have permitted useful comparisons between the different levels of organization from which the illness was studied earlier.
De Waelhens, A., & Ver Eecke, W. (2001). Phenomenology and Lacan on Schizophrenia: After the Decade of the Brain (Vol. 2). Leuven University Press.
The text provides a summary of Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia. The author also uses Freud’s study on his grand-child to demonstrate how the human brain develops and forms consciousness as well as self-awareness.
Russell, A. T., Bott, L., & Sammons, C. (1989). The phenomenology of schizophrenia occurring in childhood. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 28(3), 399-407.
The case study involves children who have schizophrenia. The study was meant to observe the children in an attempt to understand how their brains developed consciousness and whether that function of the brain was controllable.