Concerning the Constitution of Incomprehensibility in Schizophrenia

Contributions to a Subject Constructivistic Theory About Insanity

Abstract

The purpose of the introductory article and the Danish translation of Erich Wullfs article from 1992 is to introduce the German social psychiatrist Erich Wulff’s theoretical work on schizophrenia, in a Danish context. In both introduction and original article, Wulff’s con- tructivist and critical psychological theory on and structural analysis of schizophrenic psychosis is presented.

The overall aim of the article is to phenomenologically uncover and understand the breakdown between subjective being and objective reality and between internal experience and exterior facts, which the schizophrenic psychosis is an expression of. The main purpose of the article is trying to understand the unintelligibility of the schizophrenic psychosis, that is to understand the “secret of production” of it, so to speak.

This is exemplified with the concepts of “personal sense” and “objective meaning”and it is shown how the person with schizophrenic psychosis dissociates the relation between these two concepts through a paradoxical annulment of the connection between them. In the introductory article the analysis is taken further from how this takes place to answer the question of why this dissociation has to take place: How can we understand the eventual function and intention behind the development of schizoprenic psychosis and which implications can this have for therapeutical practice? The introductory article furthermore outlines the perpectives of Wulffs theory for an applied (social-) psychiatric and terapeutical practice, which points towards important ways of tran- scending the dominating reductionist biome- dical and descriptive psychiatry.