Ipseity and Embodiment within the Lived Experience of Schizophrenia
Theoría Revista del Colegio de Filosofía May 26, 2026 Bryan Rojas-Huerta, José Carlos Medina-Rodríguez, Lisa Sheccid Dávila-orozco et al.
Schizophrenia disrupts not just thought, emotion, or perception but the very structure that makes experience possible. This theoretical paper argues that self-disorders—disturbances in the minimal, pre-reflective, embodied, and affective sense of self—are central to the schizophrenia spectrum, not peripheral symptoms. Drawing on phenomenology, clinical psychiatry, and philosophy of science, it describes how disruptions in agency, embodiment, temporality, and intersubjectivity precede and organize psychotic phenomena. The Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE) is discussed as a clinical tool that maps these pre-reflective disturbances and their transformation into reflective distortions. The paper proposes reconceptualizing schizophrenia's ontological status, shifting from descriptive taxonomies to the structural conditions sustaining personal experience, with diagnostic and therapeutic implications for early intervention.