Group Identification and Collective Intentionality in Schizophrenia 

 Alessandro Salice, CFS, Copenhagen

wzv817@hum.ku.dk

Recent empirical studies on early, non-psychotic anomalous self-experiences in schizophrenia have demonstrated that the majority of first-admission patients complain about profound feelings of dissimilarity vis á vis other human beings (‘I feel like an alien’), excessive self-monitoring tendencies  (e.g., observing one’s own mental states rather than being spontaneously engaged and immersed in worldly activities), difficulties in establishing and maintaining emotional relationships with others, and lack of ability to grasp or disinterest towards societal norms and tacit rules of social interaction (i.e., perplexity).

In various ways, schizophrenia seems to involve an anomalous form of collective intentionality: in psychosis patients with schizophrenia may be absorbed in their delusional world but at the same remain inconspicuously adapted to the shared social world. Moreover, many patients report to have major problems with basic everyday social interactions like ‘small talk’, whereas they often function much better socially in situations where there are explicit and codified rules (e.g., playing games). 

The aim of this talk is to shed light on schizophrenia, collective intentionality, and their relation. The main hypothesis is that collective intentionality comes in different forms and that especially two of them play a particularly relevant role in schizophrenia. The first is a goal-oriented form of intentionality that is made distinctive by the presence of coordination and by ‘rules of the game’ that are explicitly formulated. The second is characterized as the intentionality of a we where the we is conceived of as the result of a process of group-identification: there is a we if individuals think of themselves as sharing a social identity and, hence, if they conceive of themselves as being members of a we. In order to characterize these two forms of collective intentionality, I draw on works done in social identity theory and in phenomenology. 

Based on the hypothesis, the socially instable behavior that is typical of patients with schizophrenia, and usually is an unfailing source of loneliness and isolation, could be interpreted by arguing that patients often are impeded to activate one of these two forms, but not the other. Patients with schizophrenia do not seem to fall short when it comes to the goal-oriented form of collective intentionality—and this is especially so if the coordination that it requires relies on a set of explicitly formulated rules. However, they often appear to display notable difficulties with the establishment of social identities. Indeed, it will be argued that the very process of group-identification seems to be unstable and fragile in their case: not only is group-identification impeded by their profound feelings of being radically different from others, the “depersonalization” effect important for group formation is often counteracted by the patients’ frequent inability to be spontaneously engaged with others and by the recurrent and related tendencies to hyper-reflect and self-observe.