December 2016

The notion of a disorder of the self as being a core feature of schizophrenia has existed since the early days of schizophrenia research, but recent work has clarified and specified the type of self-disturbance that may be at play (Chung, 2007; Parnas, 2000; Parnas and Sass, 2001). In order to understand the type of selfdisturbance being referred to in recent phenomenological writings, it is necessary to distinguish between several ‘‘levels’’ or types of selfhood. Parnas (2003) identifies three levels of selfhood from a phenomenological perspective (see Table 1).

The world around us is a constant thing for the psychology and, all in all, for any of us. Humans’ lamentations about the evil world are heard more or less often in different cultures. In Eastern Europe as we said before, the voices blaming others in their problems sound especially loudly. Who is right and who’s to blame is a question our neighbors, the Russians try to answer for centuries. This we noted when we were talking about Dostoyevsky/

'Qualia' is a philosophers' term of art denoting those intrinsic or monadic properties of our sensations discriminated in introspection. The quale of a sensation is typically contrasted with its causal, relational, or functional features, and herein lies a problem for functionalism. The quale of a given sensation - pain, say - is at best contingently connected with the causal or functional properties of that state; and yet common intuitions insist that said quale is an essential element of pain, on some views, the essential element. Functionalism, it is concluded, provides an inadequate account of our mental states.