Wittgenstein, the enigma of the obvious, and the sphinx of psychiatry: body and language in schizophrenia
Abstract
Oliver Sacks presents the clinical case of a girl with a deep proprioceptive deficit as a disembodied experience, comparable to a Wittgensteinian situation. Similarly, some psychopathologists try to understand schizophrenic delusions through Wittgenstein. However, Wittgenstein can also guide the study of pauci-symptomatic forms of pathology. It is possible to discuss some issues raised by Wittgenstein's On Certainty in affinity with those presented by Blankenburg about the loss of natural self-evidence. Especially exploring the idea of a pathology of common sense can help to understand the doubts of people with schizophrenia. By analyzing the embodied nature of common sense in its linguistic implications, it is also possible to better observe what kind of evidence schizophrenia reveals: our being a bodily-intellectual difference-identity in a complex body-language relationship.
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