Jaspers, the body, and schizophrenia: The bodily self

Karl Jaspers laid the foundations of contemporary psychopathology. Among Jaspers' contributions was his powerful vision of psychiatry as a crucial way to shed light on the human condition and existence by integrating the scientific study of psychic diseases with a theoretical approach focused on human experience. This perspective should be revitalized. In the present paper we start from the role Jaspers assigns to the body when discussing the notion of 'personalization'. We explore the relationship between a minimal notion of the self, the 'bodily self', and its potentiality for movement - the self's 'power for action'. Based on recent empirical evidence, we then propose a connection between the implicit bodily self-experience and important psychopathological aspects of schizophrenia by showing that schizophrenic patients exhibit a disruption of implicit bodily self-knowledge. We propose that the bodily nature of the implicitly experiencing self might enable the continuum of experience along which all visions of the world are located - both in healthy and psychotic individuals. The power for action might provide the possibility to give form to the bodily presence characterizing in the first place our being selves. © 2013 S. Karger AG, Basel.