Disturbances of intentionality in schizophrenia and in depression

Abstract

After defining that fundamental element of psychic life which is intentionality, based on original descriptions by Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl, the authors try to show the way in which this phenomenon is respectively altered in schizophrenia and in depression.

For understanding what occurs with respect to this in schizophrenia it is first necessary to focus on what Husserl calls “the consciousness of the interior or immanent time”. The current of consciousness is not a mere succession of “nows”, but of a process of dynamic self-organization, which begins to be developed as, for example, a lecture or a melody is heard. The persistence of the past in me is what Husserl called retentio, while he called protentio this permanent anticipation of the future. The intentional arc would be what connects the beginning and the end of a phrase or of a melody. This intentional arc will keep tenser, the bigger is the potency of the aim of my speech and my capacity to exclude inadequate associations. Thomas Fuchs has compared this protentio function with a cone, whose starting point is the “now”. The more ordered is the thought and/or talk, the thinner will be the surface of the cone. In schizophrenia this cone expands and then there appears what Bleuler called “lax associations”, Cameron “overinclusion” and Peters “disturbance of the field of the word”. In previous works one of the authors (O. D. Z.) has developed the idea that the common denominator to all thought and/or language disturbances of schizophrenia would be the loss of the dialogic character, since context finally means co-text, text in common, agreement. Thomas Fuchs thinks that not only the alteration of thought is a consequence of the disturbance of the intentionality, but also the rest of the symptoms of schizophrenia. And thus, in delusional mood there would be a “retraction” of the intentional arc and in the paranoid ideas, an inversion of the intentionality and then the patient, instead of being actively thinking, perceiving and acting, is transformed in victim of the perceptions and actions of the others. Finally, this weakening of the intentionality also comes to explain the obstruction of the “life path”, the ability of constructing one’s own life.

In the case of melancholia, the disturbance of the intentionality would be presented in the first place in the “not-being-able-to” or inhibition (one of the fundamental symptoms of this illness) and which von Gebsattel, with his concept of Werdenshemmung (inhibition of becoming), considered as the root of all the depressive manifestations. The disturbance of the intentionality is also showed to us in another phenomenon which has to do with temporality, which is the incapacity to anticipate.

But the other fundamental phenomena of this illness can also be seen as a disturbance of the intentionality. Thus, in what we have called “becoming a thing” or “chrematization” (1980) and Fuchs “corporealization” (2005), when the body loses its transparence, the subject cannot project himself toward the action and toward the future. Finally, the third fundamental phenomenon of melancholy, which is the alteration, inversion or suspension of the biologic rhythms, is temporal by definition and insofar they constitute the base of anticipation, there is not other possibility than its compromise be expressed in a severe disturbance of intentionality.