What can schizophrenia teach us about emotions?

Dina Mendonça

pp. 149-161

in: Inês Hipólito, Jorge Goncalves, João Pereira (eds), Schizophrenia and common sense, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

The chapter argues that the contradiction of emotional experiences identified in schizophrenic patients is a part of everyone's emotional life. Building on Ratcliffe's idea of thinking of schizophrenia in relational terms and taking up the claim that the minimal self reflects a fundamental orientation to the world and the social world, the chapter looks into schizophrenic emotional life as a way to offer insights about emotions. The visibility of contradiction seen in schizophrenia patients brings to the surface some aspects of the complexity of emotional life, and reveals some of the processing of emotional experiences. Consequently, taking the contradiction of emotional experience in schizophrenia as familiar instead of strange, shows that emotional life entails experiences in which we can find inconsistencies between first order emotions, moods and the emotional episode, as well as experiences of conflict between first order emotions and meta-emotions. The chapter concludes by indicating that accepting the similarity of processing of layers of emotions and the recognition that the outcomes are different raises further issues for research questions to better understand schizophrenia.